


Fluffy February Challenge

by Aleaiactaest



Series: Valentine & Vimes [4]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 1, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel
Genre: F/F, Fluffy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 34,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aleaiactaest/pseuds/Aleaiactaest
Summary: A series of challenges forFluffy February."Chapter 6: Kiss in the rain"is a part of the"Valentine & Vimes"series.
Relationships: Desdemona/Lambda 8, DiMA/Faraday (Fallout), Glory/PAM, Harkness/Deacon, Nick Valentine/Samuel Vimes, Vault Dweller/Tycho
Series: Valentine & Vimes [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076
Comments: 63
Kudos: 12
Collections: Fluffy February 2021





	1. Fishing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Canon divergent. Assumes that, instead of hanging around Vault 13 and founding a tribe, the Vault Dweller stayed with the Brotherhood and [was sent to the east to go tracking escapees from the Master's army](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel_\(Midwest\)#Background).

Albert Cole had a way of talking people around into the most absurd of things. Go to the face-meltingly radioactive Glow to retrieve some holo-tapes as a part of a particularly cruel and unfunny hazing ritual? Join the Brotherhood of Weirdos to get access to their resources? 

Yet Tycho had let himself be led by the man. It was for a good cause, the ranger told himself. Albert had been out to find a new Water Chip for his Vault, Vault 13, and without it, the sheltered Vault inhabitants would have died the long, slow death of dehydration. Tycho had watched men die of dehydration. It wasn’t a pretty death, not that any of them were. The way that the crying kidneys started to falter…

The Vaulties could have moved outside, of course, but they were so naive that Tycho thought most of them would have perished, even if their Overseer Jacoren would have allowed them outside. He might not have. Albert, cynically, opined that Jacoren might have just kept everyone inside to die.

Albert had wanted to take a small group to live outside the Vault. He was something of a political agitator. He’d read about the outside, studied what little the Vaulties knew of it, and despite all that, Albert had been painfully unprepared for the reality of the wasteland. Tycho personally marvelled at the thousands of ways that Albert had narrowly avoided getting himself killed in the waste. Perhaps Albert’s best move in the game of his continued survival had been in befriending Tycho, the veteran desert ranger, although Tycho only thought as much in rare moments of hubris.

Then Tycho had fallen for Albert who, well - sparkled, like the mirage of water on the horizon, and when Vault 13 had ultimately rejected Albert, the ingrates, Albert went back to the Brotherhood that he’d leaned on for supplies and healing in his quest to find a Water Chip. Tycho, not without qualms, followed Albert.

If Ian had still been alive, he wouldn’t have had qualms.

But Tycho, he wanted to make the world a better place, a safer place for the people upon this wasteland Earth. It was why he was a ranger, as his forefathers had been. The Brotherhood didn’t make the world a better place. It didn’t move past the mistakes and refuse of the Old World. Instead, it wallowed in them.

Still, Albert was fool’s gold in Tycho’s hand that he just couldn’t let go of, and Albert  _ was _ a political agitator - of sorts, and that was why the two of them had ended up semi-exiled, along with all of the other Brotherhood members who felt both that the Brotherhood could use some new blood and that it ought to share its technology to help others. The Elders had dispatched them on airships, sent off towards the East to track down fleeing super mutants that had belonged to the Master’s army.

Albert, cast away from Vault 13, understood implicitly that the Elders did not intend them to return.

Tycho could have done without the part where they crashed.

Their airship went down at the ruins of a great city at the edge of a vast, grey lake. Their small surviving detachment, cross-checking against maps, had concluded that the pre-war city had once been called “Chicago”. Well, whatever it was, it was windy and cold, and they were perilously low on supplies.

Tycho didn’t know this damp, bleak wilderness, his own bones parched like the desert sands, but a ranger was nothing if not resourceful. To address the complaints of their grumbling stomachs, he went fishing, and he took Albert with him, while some of the others scavenged for firewood.

“Don’t suppose you have any safety pins on you?” Tycho asked Albert.

“Safety pins? Fresh out. Now, bobby pins…” replied Albert, who still had that habit of gawking at, well, everything.

Chicago was new to Tycho, too, who was from Nevada and had travelled as far down south as the Gulf of Mexico and then to the remains of California, but Albert didn’t have to make it so damn obvious. Of course, the fact that Tycho kept his face covered by goggles and a respirator when he was in public helped keep down the fish out of water look. So with regards to his current goal to obtain some fishes out of water… “Gather up some green sticks of wood about a third as thick as your finger.”

Fishing here would be different than any of the places that Tycho had been, but he was counting on the fact that a lot of fishes are quite dumb and would fall for the trick of a baited hook. It wasn’t like fish could compare notes on the matter. The hooked ones never made it back.

“A third as thick as my finger? You mean, like Elder - ” Albert started.

Tycho snorted.

While Albert gathered sticks, Tycho worked on finding bait, running his gloved hands through the dirt. This place was so damp! He’d heard an old story that putting a stake in the ground and then running a rusty hacksaw over the stake would make vibrations that would drive worms out of the ground, but he was distinctly lacking the hacksaw department. If he’d had some bread, he could have tried to catch minnows to use for bait, but if he’d had bread, one of the other soldiers in the detachment would have eaten it.

That was why Tycho had made a little net from parachute cord he’d scavenged after the crash. He’d just set up to catch… well, he wasn’t sure they were minnows, exactly, but they were small fish that schooled in the shallow edges of the lake, when Albert returned with a bundle of sticks, most of which were unsuitable. Tycho picked out two passable sticks and handed one back to Albert. Then he pulled out his knife and got to whittling, gesturing for Albert to do the same. “Strip the bark and sharpen the ends, then cut a notch in the middle to tie the line.”

“So fishing hooks aren’t actual hooks?” asked Albert, curiously, as they sat by the edge of the lake together, whittling time away.

“Don’t have to be,” replied Tycho.

Albert was slow and unsteady with the knife, but he didn’t cut himself. Months back, Tycho would have been worried about Albert with a knife on account of the harm he might do himself. His Vaultie had come so far… as far as Chicago, apparently. After Tycho had turned out several hooks, Albert managed to finish one passable one. Tycho showed him how to bait the gorge hook by holding the line and the gorge parallel to each other so the gorge was held vertically by the bait. “When the fish swallows the bait, the gorge’ll be stuck horizontally in its throat.”

“Line and sinker?” Albert added impishly.

Then they threw out their hooks, baited with mutie minnows, and they waited.

Eventually, Tycho admitted, “Seeing this much fresh water all in one place is surreal.”

“Yeah,” agreed Albert. “Lake Mich-again, huh? Wonder where the first Mich is...”

Tycho laughed a little, and maybe the vibration on his pole did him some good, because he got a bite. He hauled up the fish, which had two eyes. That was the only good thing to be said for it. He added it to the bucket.

Thusly the evening passed. Eventually, Albert wrestled out a huge monstrosity of a sturgeon. Tycho hated to break it to Albert, who was grinning over the stupidly large fish that he’d resorted to clubbing over the head with the butt end of his old hunting rifle, but Tycho steeled himself and said gently, “We’re not going to be able to eat that.”

“But look at all the meat on it!” Albert said plaintively, gesturing to the brained sturgeon.

“A big benthic feeder like that is gonna have concentrated all sorts of heavy metals,” Tycho explained, conciliatory.

Albert pouted. He always looked kissable when he did that, but Tycho wasn’t going to unmask right now.

“We can cut it up for bait,” Tycho offered.

Albert sighed heavily. “Well… let me at least get a picture of it with my Pip-Boy’s camera first. Paladin Jennifer won’t believe me about the size of this.”

Tycho patted Albert on the arm. “Women never do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fellow who founded the tribe near Vault 13 was an imposter, for the purposes of this universe.


	2. Movie night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DiMA/Faraday. Canon divergent. Makes the assumption that Deacon was sent to Acadia instead of Boxer and that Deacon went to Acadia alone, without the Sole Survivor.

The Railroad agent “Deacon” was an odd one. He’d been deeply concerned about Acadia’s security, butting heads with Chase on the matter but impressing Dejen in the process. Then he’d decided that Acadia needed “enrichment” because Cog was “dangerously bored”, and that was why Deacon and Chase had to go clean out the Eden Meadows Cinemas of ferals so that the synths of Acadia could go watch movies.

DiMA had been frankly impressed and bewildered that Deacon talked Chase into that.

Then Chase and Deacon returned with a third person in tow, which had begged certain questions, questions which Chase was better about answering than Deacon. It turned out that there was a synth, P0-51, who’d been directed to Acadia by a “Mister Tims”, but P0-51 had gotten lost and had been scared and holed up in the dilapidated Eden Meadows Cinema, unable to get away without attracting the ghouls.

Chase was unamused. “You could have told me you thought there was a synth out there!”

“What, and miss the chance to convince you that your people need entertainment? Perish the thought,” Deacon replied mildly.

P0-51 settled in quickly, moving into the horticultural laboratory with Aster.

Then Deacon made good on his movie night threats.

That was how DiMA ended up sitting on top of a derelict car, leaning against Faraday’s shoulder.

“Everyone had their Rad-X that needs it?” Deacon asked cheerily, surveying the movie night party.

Gen 3 synths were, unfortunately, not immune to radiation, although some humans had that misconception about them, and radiation was a common hazard on the island.

“Uhm, I’m actually wearing a hazmat suit, so I think I’m fine,” said P0-51, who was indeed wearing a hazmat suit.

“Cool! Loving the fashion choice,” said Deacon, inscrutable. “Now, if everyone would just turn off their radios, Pip-Boys, and other assorted noise-making devices...”

DiMA murmured to Faraday, “He’s making a joke, isn’t he?”

Faraday shrugged. “I think so?”

The credits rolled. They were watching  _ Night of the Fish Men's Revenge _ . A quarter of the way through, Dejen got twitchy and shot a hole in the screen after one too many fish-associated jump-scares. Halfway through, Cog got bored and snuck into the reel room and switched the movie for  _ Last Stand at Fort McGee _ , which led Faraday, of all synths, to snap, “Cog! Put it back! I wanted to see the fish man get with Carl Dickson!”

Miranda tittered, “Faraday, darling, I… don’t think that was the direction the story was going.”

Faraday sagged against DiMA. “Oh. Well. I guess I don’t need to see the end, then.”

“Also, that’s not Carl Dickson. That’s Carl Dickson the actor playing  _ Matthew Anderson _ , action hero,” chimed in Deacon.

“Whatever! If he doesn’t get with the fish man, there’s no point to it,” huffed Faraday, crossing his arms.

DiMA tilted Faraday’s chin up. “Did you want to write your own movie, dear?”

“I - I wouldn’t know where to start,” stammered Faraday.

“Friend, if you look at the utter garbage they cranked out Pre-War - like  _ Last Stand at Fort McGee _ , seriously, I don’t even feel bad talking during this, you cannot do worse. And it’s just like writing code, right?” said Deacon.

“I don’t think so?” Faraday said faintly.

“I have perfect confidence in you,” said DiMA, cuddling against Faraday. The downside of a war movie versus a horror movie, DiMA was realizing, was that horror movies were much better for excuses to snuggle.

It was over a year later, after the fall of the Institute, when they gathered again to watch  _ Night of the Fish Men's Romance _ , which contained no less than twenty different roles played by Deacon. __

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Tims sent me to Far Harbor because there was a synth at Eden Meadows cinema.
> 
> Mr. Tims also sent me to the bowling alley.
> 
> Mr. Tims :|


	3. Adopting an animal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Same universe as "Fishing", takes place before.

It was the Skum Pitt in Junktown, a sleazy dive bar in a village made of garbage. When an outsider in black leather armour waltzed in, glittering eyes dancing over the occupants. Tycho, behind his goggles, looked back at him, and decided that the other man probably wasn’t going to live very long, and that was a shame. He flitted like a gynandromorphic butterfly from person to person, talking to everyone in turn, leaving everyone looking as if they’d been heard, eventually alighting next to Tycho. Tycho greeted, “Another new face. Travelers here are a dime a dozen. But you have the look of someone different. Care to join me for a drink?”

“I’d love to,” said the outsider, grinning and sitting down next to Tycho, almost too close.

“Delightful. I hope you don't mind your drink well-watered - they treat beer here like it's a potted plant,” Tycho advised.

“Or hydroponics?” suggested the outsider, and he seemed to catch how Tycho’s body language was saying,  _ That’s an odd thing to say, _ because he switched and asked, “So, what's your story?”

The outsider took the weak beer that Tycho offered, anyway, rather blithely. If Tycho had been a certain sort of scum, there’d have been some very unsavoury chems in that drink. The outsider didn’t seem to have considered that. The veteran ranger mulled a few things over and concluded that his new drinking companion was a Vault Dweller. The Pip-Boy was a dead giveaway. Those types weren’t long for the outside world without a helping hand. Tycho offered, “I could ask the same of you. In the interest of amity, I suppose I'll tell first. I'm called Tycho. Came from out east, what used to be called Nevada.”

The Vault Dweller smiled warmly and tendered in return, “I’m Albert Cole.” He fiddled with his Pip-Boy. “Nevada, you say? Oh, that’s far…”

Tycho nodded. “Yeah, it was a pretty long trip. Decided to take it easy for a while.” He leaned back in his chair. “This place shows some promise, just as soon as someone cleans up some of the scum.”

“That your angle?” Albert inquired.

“Not my place,” Tycho said mildly. He wasn’t inclined to tip his hand to a stranger, not even a lost handsome stranger. “I'd rather not cross Killian, after all. He'll clean up this town when he gets around to it. A good man, mark my words. But watch out for that fellow Gizmo. Reminds me of another freak my father told me about back in Las Vegas.”

For all Tycho knew, Albert was working for Gizmo. It would be like Gizmo to take in someone sheltered and naive and use him up until there was nothing left.

“Mmm, but if Killian had, say, asked me to clean up this town, could I ask for your help?” asked Albert, who seemed to be trying to tease out where exactly Tycho stood.

Tycho lowered his voice. “I’d say it's about time Killian made his move. Lead on, my friend, and let's do some street sweeping. I'd recommend knocking over Gizmo, if I may.”

Albert laughed, but there was nervousness there. “My, but you get right to the point, don’t you? Look, I was just going to carry a tape recorder and try to get Gizmo to talk a bit.”

Tycho considered; Albert just might be able to do that. Albert seemed to be able to get just about anyone to talk.

“Killian’s politically savvy. He knows he can’t just remove one of the major employers in town. He wants some sort of evidence before he makes a move, and Gizmo doesn’t know me,” Albert continued.

Now, if Tycho worked for Albert, the Vault Dweller would have been screwed. 

“Thank for the drink. I’ve another friend I ought to introduce you to. Ian,” added Albert.

“A friend?” Tycho asked carefully.

“Just a friend,” said Albert, tinged with chagrin.

“Well, lead on,” said Tycho, curious to see where this was going to go. Albert was probably going to die, and this Ian, too, but if there was a chance to rid Junktown of Gizmo’s strangling influence, Tycho’s honour thought he ought to see it through.

Tycho heard the mutt before he saw it, a junkyard dog terrorizing old man Phil, who took a desperate look at Albert and pleaded, “Mister, I would be really happy if you were to get rid of that damn dog!”

Albert, that fool, sidled up to the mean junkyard dog and promptly tried to scritch it between the ears. Tycho knew it was their sheltered upbringings that gave Vault Dwellers the survival skills of an albino lemming in the desert, but he still cringed. To lose a man who wanted to help clean up Junktown to rabies -

“Who’s a good boy?” exclaimed Albert, miraculously unbit, as he took down his backpack and started to rummage through it.

Phil looked startled and advised, “I wouldn't trust that beast, if I was you. That thing is a killer.”

“Yeah… I wouldn’t touch that,” said Tycho, keeping a cautious distance.

Albert pulled out a skewer of jerkied meat kebabs and offered a bite to the dog. Somehow, the dog didn’t take off any of Albert’s fingers in the process. “It’s you! You’re the good boy! Does the very good boy want iguana bits?”

“That’s not iguana,” Tycho muttered. He was pretty sure he knew damn well what it was, and it was absolutely not a good thing to get a dog hooked on the taste of, but the scene unfolded in front of him like a sand dune crashing over a caravan.

The dog happily ate the “iguana” bits, and Albert, still petting the dog, looked up at Phil and asked, “He’s not your dog?”

“It ain't my dog!” Phill huffed. “It was the 'pet' of a traveller. When the traveller died, this damn dog just plopped its furry ass down on my doorstep and wouldn't leave. It's been there for days. It won't let us back into our house!”

“What I’m hearing is, ‘free dog’?” Albert asked hopefully.

“I’d shoot it if I were you,” Phil said venomously, eyeing Albert’s hunting rifle.

“No, I’ve read about dogs! They’re man’s best friend. For did not a bitch suckle Rome?” said Albert.

He lost both Tycho and Phil there.

“What was his owner like?” asked Albert, regrouping.

Phil begrudgingly explained, “Oh, the guy was tall, dark-haired with a little graying around the edges. He was dressed all in black leather,” he paused, eyeing the black leather that Albert was currently wearing, “like that's a good idea in the desert, and carried a shotgun. He had some funny accent. The dog was his constant companion, followed him everywhere. He came from the east, he said. Like anyone could get past the deadlands to the east. He ran afoul of Gizmo, trying to interfere with Gizmo's business. So, Gizmo had a couple of boys beat him up and throw him from the casino roof. The traveller broke his damnfool neck and died. The dog was pissed.”

Tycho saw a brief moment of calculation in Albert’s eyes as Phil casually mentioned what happened to travellers who got involved in Gizmo’s business. Maybe Albert’s nerves would falter. Maybe he’d back out of his plan to dig up actionable dirt on Gizmo that Killian could use. Then Albert gave the dog a particularly good scritch, and the dog rolled over playfully.

Albert’s personal magnetism apparently extended to vicious mongrels, Tycho realized, blinking.

Albert leaned in and murmured to the dog, “Well, boy, we’re going to get you some justice, hmm?”

_ Bark! _ went the dog, and he wagged his tail.

Then Albert gave Phil a friendly nod and started to walk away with the dog, as Phil, faintly baffled, tendered, “Thanks for your help?” as he was finally able to get back into his home.

Tycho followed behind, studying the dog cautiously. No, he didn’t think it was rabid, after all. Just apparently had very specific taste in humans. Tycho tried not to think too hard about that. 

Albert led the way to the Crash House, the local “hotel”, and knocked on a door, calling, “Ian, wake up! I’ve made a new friend!”

After a moment, a short, stocky man who had the look of a caravan guard about him opened the door. Albert cheerily introduced, “Ian, this is Tycho, and our new dog.”

Tycho paused.  _ Our _ new dog? What did he just get himself into?


	4. Halloween

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Desdemona/[Lambda 8](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Railroad_HQ_terminal_entries#2276_Jan). Before Desdemona was the leader of the Railroad, she was Angie the simple farmer who'd fallen in love with a strange woman who went by "Sam" (the synth Lambda 8).

Once upon a time, Desdemona had not been Desdemona, plucked from a Shakespearean tragedy. She’d been Angie the simple farmer, courting the love of her life, a woman named Sam. Sam was an odd duck. In most matters, she seemed as sheltered as a Vaultie, but she’d clearly been a slave at some point. Sam didn’t talk about it much, and when she did talk about it, she didn’t make much sense.

One thing that Sam didn’t understand was Halloween. The trappings of Halloween were all around in the ruins of the Commonwealth. There wasn’t any money in scavenging old paper black cats, so those were left behind, even when the buildings were picked clean. Now the plastic pumpkins were a choicer target for scavengers, because they could still be used as containers, but it wasn’t too hard to find Sam a plastic pumpkin.

“But we have real pumpkins,” said Sam, turning the plastic pumpkin pail over in her hands.

Some of the gourds that Angie grew on her farm came close to the pictures of pumpkins in old books. Angie was very proud of the breeding work she’d done on those gourds. She speculated, “See, children used to go door to door with those buckets, and the neighbours would put candy in them. I guess hollowing out a real pumpkin wouldn’t work too well. It’d be heavy to carry for a child.”

“I see. Do children still come door to door now?” asked Sam.

“Sometimes,” said Angie. “But since I have you here, I’ll have you up on the second floor, watching over the porch with a shotgun. If you see raiders or other malfeasants coming, you holler, you understand?”

“Of course, Angie. But we don’t have candy?” said Sam.

“No.” There were some farmers a few homesteads over who’d gotten into tapping trees for sugar, a few farmers had been successful at keeping bees, and Angie had heard rumours of folks still growing sugar beets up north, but sugar or honey, it was all awfully expensive. Most of the sugar got bought up by brewers who were looking to make rum, a high value item, and some of the sugar was put to work as a preservative for jams and such. No one had the money to spend on using sugar to make candies to hand out to children. “If any of the children from the local farmsteads make it out here, I’ll give ‘em dried mutfruits. And if raiders bother us, I’ll give ‘em lead. Do you want to carve a pumpkin? We can make a lantern from it. Decorate the porch.”

“But what do I carve it as?” asked Sam.

“Something scary is traditional. Frighten away evil spirits or something,” said Angie, shrugging. “The children are supposed to dress up as monsters, too.”

Sam took some time to herself and came back with a pumpkin that had been carved with a design like six trees, which branched once, twice, and thrice. She jutted her chin out defiantly and said, “It’s terrifying.”

Angie had never seen that sign before. “Gang sign?”

“Something worse,” said Sam, and she shuddered.

Angie patted Sam on the shoulder. “It’ll do fine to scare the spirits away. If there are any.”

Then they toasted pumpkin seeds and ate them until sun set. Angie sent Sam up to the second floor with a shotgun. Some children from a few farms over did come by, and Angie rewarded them with plenty of dried mutfruits for their trouble. Most of them just wore tatty old sheets and said they were ghosts. One had rolled around in a dead skunk and said he was a ghoul; his siblings didn’t look too happy with him. His older sister complained, “Who ever heard of a child ghoul, anyway?”

There was also a child dressed in scavenged Mr. Handy pieces who went _beep beep beep._

After the children had stopped coming, and there was only the dark and autumn’s chill, Angie joined Sam back upstairs, and Sam asked, “Are robots scary?”

Sam had been working on fixing up a Mr. Handy for the farm. It’d be useful for weeding, Angie thought, if Sam could make it go. “They can be if they go haywire.”

“If they’re malfunctioning?” Sam said pensively. She seemed deeply perturbed.

“I suppose,” said Angie.

“If they think they’re real people, with hopes and dreams and loves?” said Sam, looking around furtively.

That was a strange thing to say about robots. “I don’t see how that would hurt anyone. I meant shooting people up.”

Sam relaxed. “Could you love a robot?”

What an odd question. “Don’t know how that’s relevant. I love you.”

“But would you still love me if I was a robot?” Sam asked, oddly concerned by a daydream hypothetical.

“If you were still you? Yes, I’d still love you if you were a robot. Yes, by that orange harvest moon in the sky,” said Angie.

That was good enough for Sam on her first Halloween, as she hugged Angie tightly.


	5. Cooking together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon. AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Established relationship between Deacon and Harkness.

There was a problem with the route assigned to the current package on Deacon’s hands, which meant that he got to call upon one of the Railroad’s delightful “problem-solvers” known as “Heavies”. The Railroad didn’t have many, and Deacon knew what all of them were doing better than they did - unless something had gone wrong, of course. So when he put the dead drop asking for the path to be cleared into the old mail box marked with a Rail sign, Deacon was fairly certain which Heavy he was going to get, and that was fine - the Heavy he had in mind was well-versed with the obstacle that was currently in front of Deacon.

If a different Heavy showed, Deacon would know something had gone wrong.

He really hoped nothing had gone wrong, and he told himself that it was simply because something unfortunate happening to one of the Railroad’s Heavies implied something unfortunate for the Railroad in general. Deacon told himself that it had nothing to do with the fact that he had gradually, imperceptibly as a thief, developed feelings for the Heavy that he expected to show, absolutely nothing to do with how upset he’d be if anything had befallen... his boyfriend.

That thought, that denial, was, of course, a lie.

But his Heavy did show, Harkness in one of those Railroad armoured coats. Tinker Tom’s scavenger helpers had found a crate full of military-grade coats in an old warehouse, years back, and the Railroad distributed them to any Heavy who wanted one. Tommy Whispers had never used a Railroad armoured coat, instead travelling light in leather armour. Deacon didn’t know that it would have made a difference for that poor bastard. 

Harkness looked good in that armoured coat, though, Deacon thought, from his perch high in a tree, overlooking the river. The Railroad beige was a tad friendlier than the _black_ armoured coats that Harkness had literally been made to wear. Now, river crossings were never great, even under the best of circumstances. Water was still unpleasantly radioactive, and despite the radioactivity, water was also full of diseases.

Sure was nice that Harkness was an _experimental_ synth who was immune to both disease _and_ radiation. Most synths weren’t immune to radiation; they’d die like humans if they went for too long a swim, but oh, Zimmer had taken a little extra time making Harkness. Those two lovely properties, in addition to how good Harkness looked in a beige coat, were not exactly why Deacon was happy that Harkness was the particular Heavy answering this call. 

Nor was it that Deacon didn’t mind an excuse to watch his boyfriend in action.

The main reason was that, this time of year, the river was overrun with spawning-mad mirelurks that would fight anything that moved, trying to impress the chicks or the guys or whatever it was that mirelurks went for. Harkness had spent years doing security in Rivet City, and one huge security problem that had always plagued Rivet City was mirelurks. Capital Wasteland and Commonwealth mirelurks were different, but they all died the same, in a blaze of crustacean glory.

Also, all that time in half-flooded Rivet City meant that Harkness knew how to swim - he had a pretty interesting story about a crook with a rebreather who had hid in one of the flooded areas - which was good, because river currents were ever-treacherous mothers of beaches.

Harkness surveyed the river, and while it was difficult to see from Deacon’s tree-perch, he could have sworn that Harkness spared one sidelong glance for Deacon’s position before unshouldering his rifle and wading in to do a Heavy’s day’s work slaughtering mirelurks. So Harkness knew Deacon was here, waiting to see when the job was done; so what? Of course, Harkness did the day’s work in a few minutes.

Deacon slipped down the tree and then casually surveyed the path that Harkness had cleared. There was a bumper crop of mirelurk eggs lining both sides of the shores. Despite those eggs being freshly orphaned, Deacon wasn’t at all worried about the mirelurk harvest next year; they’d have plenty, and speaking of plenty… “Hey. There’s an abandoned farmstead just north of here. You pick out some prime cuts and take them there, and I’ll cook you up something special right after I deliver the news that the package’s path is clear. And also that they ought to come ready for a barbeque.”

Harkness didn’t appear surprised when Deacon appeared, which meant that he’d definitely noticed Deacon previously, but Harkness was polite enough today not to comment on it. Instead, he said shortly, “Deacon.” Then he paused, hesitated, and started, “You know, Commonwealth mirelurk just isn’t the same as - ”

“ - Capital Wasteland mirelurk, I know, _I know,_ ” Deacon finished, because Harkness had only brought this up with Deacon a thousand times. Those Capital Wastelanders had some strong opinions about mirelurk. “Just relax, baby. I’m not making you some tired old mirelurk cakes that just make you think about how you can never go home. I’m making you something that is _completely different_ , something so good that it’ll make you go home with _me_.”

Deacon had taken to claiming one of the homes in Sanctuary as his own, under one of his many names. It was a convenient base of operations, from time to time, one crash space of many. Neither of them would be going there today. Saying that he wanted to take Harkness home with him was merely a figure of speech. They both understood that.

Harkness snorted. “Well. I’ll never turn down your cooking.”

“I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever have to poison you,” Deacon said smilingly. He skulked away to deliver the status update on the condition of the path in front of the package, and when that was done, he made his way to the little abandoned farmstead.

Harkness was waiting there, him and three choice mirelurks, which he’d dragged into the kitchen. Dragging mirelurks around rather unfortunately left tracks. Anyone who came here would know that someone had been here recently, but frankly, if one had just gone mirelurk hunting, it wasn’t unreasonable to then duck into an abandoned building to cook one’s catch before the sweet mirelurk meat started to go rancid to high heaven. Harkness nodded to Deacon and then observed, “This farmstead’s not long-abandoned. Someone was shot here,” and he paced over and pointed out the faded, darkened blood splatter, “and then some other folks ran,” and he gestured over over the porch to where there were still footprints in the soft ground. “There’s a safe, but it’s been shot open, and it’s empty. The larder’s been ransacked. There’s children’s toys left behind on the bunk beds. Figure raiders came in, shot one of the parents, and the rest of the family ran, while the raiders took what they want.”

Sometimes, Deacon thought that Harkness had never really stopped being a security guard (never really stopped being a Courser, either, trained in investigation).

Deacon had already been to that abandoned farmstead, and he’d come to the same conclusions himself. Maybe the surviving family members would be back later to reclaim what little the raiders had left them to and to tend to the crops that the sweat of their brows had produced. Maybe the raiders were still in the areas, and Deacon and Harkness had to be careful. They wouldn’t be there long, and if raiders tried to get between Harkness and one of Deacon’s home-cooked meals, they’d regret it. 

What Deacon said was, “Really? I figured they were kidnapped by aliens. See, there’s no brahmin here. Dead giveaway. Aliens always take the brahmin first.”

Then Deacon assessed the mirelurks. The shells were tough, and he generally resorted to bludgeoning them open with the butt end of his sniper rifle. Deacon was a Wastelander through and through, and he was adept in extracting all usable meat. Waste not, want not. He and Harkness would be able to eat themselves sick, and he’d still be able to leave some leftovers in the icebox, a converted refrigerator, as a “thank you” to whoever might stumble into this place next. 

“Ugh, could you come up with a less flakey story?” said Harkness, not appreciating Deacon’s aliens.

“I could, but right now, you want me to come up with something flakey. I mean, this is seafood, my dude,” sniffed Deacon. The range was in working order, and Deacon heated some brahmin butter in the skillet. The raiders hadn’t stolen the old knob-end of the butter. They had also not stolen the half-an-onion in the icebox. Every household had to have half an onion. Deacon was fairly sure that, even after he used up the half an onion, another half an onion would somehow appear.

Cooking chopped onion in butter smelled certified delicious, and attracted by the smell, Harkness walked up behind Deacon, placing his hands lightly on his shoulders and peering over Deacon to try to see what he was doing. There had been a time when someone trying to come up behind Deacon like that would have led to Deacon stamping hard on the arch of their foot and elbowing them in the diaphragm, throwing out some cheesy line about not sneaking up on him, and then Deacon booking it, but Harkness had ever so slowly earned the right to stand behind Deacon and out his hands on Deacon’s shoulders. Oh, what a hard earned right that had been, too, Harkness being a Courser, of all things.

(If Deacon did have to get out, he would have picked up the skillet, spun, smashed it into the Courser’s face and run while the Courser was dealing with hot butter and onion in his eyes, but he reminded himself that he didn’t need to think that way about Harkness.)

Instead, Deacon leaned back slightly against Harkness, and he raised an eyebrow. “Hey, you gonna micromanage me here or you gonna let me do my magic?”

“I didn’t say anything! I just wanted to see what you were doing,” said Harkness.

Art by [Slyjinks.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/)

“Uh huh. A likely story,” Deacon scolded. “Why don’t you grab me two tatos from the garden?”

Harkness did, but as he peeled them for Deacon, he sighed, “I will never not be pissed at the Brotherhood for re-extincting potatoes.”

That was also something Harkness had told Deacon a thousand times. Harkness had the pre-War memories of a combat veteran of the 108th Infantry Regiment, memories which had been installed into him by Pinkerton. He knew what actual potatoes tasted like, as well as how to peel them, and apparently the scientists of Rivet City had done a damn fine job breeding tato varietals back to a near-perfect replica of pre-War potatoes. Then the Brotherhood had destroyed Rivet City and all that research.

“Sweetie, I keep telling you, if I ever hear any intel that someone has re-engineered potatoes again, you will be the first person I tell, and you can make me some ‘freedom fries’ like a good little pre-War GI,” replied Deacon, “but tatos are just perfect for this dish.”

After about thirty minutes of prep, an hour of cooking, and just enough back and forth banter for a cozy evening between lovers, dinner was ready, and Deacon announced proudly, “Mirelurk belly croquettes! _¡Buen provecho!_ ”

“Thank you,” Harkness replied sincerely, helping himself to one of the croquettes piled on his plate. He closed his eyes and sighed rather contently.

Deacon tilted Harkness’s chin down and ran his thumb along his jawline. Harkness kept clean-shaven, every morning, but by the end of a day, Deacon could feel stubble. “You like that, huh?”

“Good lord, yes,” Harkness admitted, eyes fluttering open. He popped another croquette in his mouth. 

“Kiss the cook?” Deacon prompted impishly.

Harkness did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fallout Shelter says Harkness is immune to radiation, and this amuses me, so I tend to run with it.


	6. Kiss in the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick Valentine/Sam Vimes. Belongs somewhere in the "Valentine & Vimes" Universe.

Art by [Slyjinks.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/)

Nick Valentine always did like the rain, and that was saying something, given what acid rain was like and how many exposed components he had. Ankh-Morpork didn’t have the Commonwealth’s radioactivity, but it was developing nasty acid rain all of its own, courtesy of the coal-burning steam engines that were becoming increasingly common. Still, the rhythmic sound of the drops, the way it made ne’er-do-wells think about staying in for the night, the _smell_ of it - for all of that, Valentine could deal with towelling himself out carefully later.

It didn’t take Valentine long to realize that his beau was also a pluviophile. Hell, he noticed it back in the Commonwealth, but it was just as true in Ankh-Morpork. If they were out in the rain on a night patrol, Vimes had this way of tucking into an alcove and hunkering down, his oilskin cape wrapped around him, his helmet tilted just so that the rain ran off the helmet and didn’t get in his eyes. Vimes, who was a man of simmering rage, of rage against injustice, of rage against the way that man treated man, of rage against the systems that inevitably produced the conditions that led to people like Valentine and Vimes needing to be summoned to sort out the mess. But when it rained, Vimes looked almost peaceful, like he had a moment to breathe, a moment to think in his own quiet dry little space, surrounded by the rain but untouched by it.

Valentine hated to disturb Vimes when he was like that, but he rarely had need to disturb Vimes. Usually, when it was time to move on, Vimes would, without prompting. The rain would wash away all trace that they had been there, that Valentine had looked upon Vimes with love through the rain.

Sometimes, Vimes would lean in slightly, adjusting himself to keep the rain off, and he was close enough to kiss. Valentine ached to do so. Of course, when they were on patrol, that wouldn’t do. Valentine should have kissed him back in Diamond City in the rain, but he’d thought that they would have time, that his whole world wasn’t going to crumble to nothing around him.

They rarely were out together in the rain now if it wasn’t work, but when wasn’t it work for them? The both of them, Valentine and Vimes, if they weren’t actually working, would throw themselves into anything that might remotely be a mystery, given half the chance.

However much Valentine loved mysteries, he also _loved_ , period. He was a romantic down in his fusion core. Valentine was somehow a smooth enough cat to induce Sam Vimes to occasionally go on genuine dates with him. As they left the smokey club, the faint strains of jazz music behind them gave away to the patter of rain drops ahead of them. Valentine had a night on the town, _the_ town, the biggest Wahoonie on the whole Disc, and his guy beside him. Who could ask for more?

Vimes had ducked into an alcove again, just out of the wind, and he was again close enough to kiss, but now they weren’t on anyone’s clock. Valentine went for it and closed that distance. Vimes kissed him back like he’d been waiting for Valentine to make that move for ages, the tips of his ears turning pink just so.

Then Valentine clasped Vimes against his chest, and Vimes leaned against him and murmured, “I… _oh_. Thank you for that, Nick.” He rubbed the back of his head, mussing his already untidy hair. “You have now idea how I’ve… erm, wanted that. You.”

Now didn’t that warm a few of the short circuits in Valentine’s battered frame. The ghost of an amused smile played on his lips1. “I think I can imagine better than you’d expect.”

Vimes fidgeted some more, looking over his shoulder, and then shivered. “Well, let’s get you home, then, and towelled off. No need for you to catch rust.”

Vimes fussing over Valentine with little to no understanding of how Valentine actually functioned was one of his more charming points. They ambled home, and Vimes insisted on cleaning every nook and cranny Valentine had to offer with a big, fluffy towel covered with the faded designs of dragons. The towel was probably an antique. Outside, the rain continued down at a steady rate.

“Can’t have you tracking damp all over our sheets in bed,” _tsk_ ed Vimes.

“What, you did just want an excuse to have your hands all over me, doll?” Valentine said lightly.

Vimes blushed again and then admitted, “I suppose that I might have.”

“Well, sweetheart, you don’t need an excuse,” Valentine murmured.

“If you say so, dear, but surely, I can’t be blamed for taking one when it presented itself?” said Vimes, his guy who could be admirably tricky given half a chance.

“Nah,” admitted Valentine, who was now warm and dry, as the rain _drip-drip-dripped_ down the windows, “I can’t at that.”

1 It played poker. Full house.


	7. Huddling for warmth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Same universe as:  
> ["Adopting an animal"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> [this]  
> ["Fishing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)

Art by [Slyjinks.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/)

The desert was cold by night. The life from the sun flooded over the sand and then skittered away to the horizon when the sun fell. Tycho had enjoyed a number of benefits out of inviting Albert to his tent with him; there was the time Albert had caught a radscorpion trying to pinch open the tent, for one thing. Cuddling back against Albert when the desert got cold was another one of those benefits. Tycho had a good tent, albeit one somewhat too small for two people, and it held heat well, but having Albert’s arms around him took the tent from cozy to toasty.

“Y’know, Ian and I had that double tent, and we’d both fight over who got to have Dogmeat on his side,” Albert murmured. “Now Ian gets to have all that dog-warmth to himself. You smell better, though.”

Tycho snorted. “What, like sand?”

“I was going to say like a nice stout…” Albert started.

“You’re being poetic again,” Tycho observed. Words were always Albert’s weapon.

“Well. Like leather. Definitely,” said Albert.

“I’ll give you that one,” Tycho admitted. He did wear leather armour.

“Better conversation, too,” added Albert.

“I’d hope so,” said Tycho.

“Of course, I wouldn't stay up past my bedtime talking to Dogmeat,” Albert teased.

“Won’t be me that keeps you up,” said Tycho. “Get to bed, Albert.”


	8. Hiding from a storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Canon divergent. Assumes that, instead of hanging around Vault 13 and founding a tribe, the Vault Dweller stayed with the Brotherhood and [was sent to the east to go tracking escapees from the Master's army](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel_\(Midwest\)#Background).  
> Same universe as:  
> ["Adopting an animal"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> ["Huddling for warmth"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481372)  
> ["Fishing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)

Tycho was used to storms, all the raging glory of nature. He respected them for their power, and he was especially wary of radiation storms when they rolled over the land. Being in the air on a Brotherhood of Steel airship gave him an entirely different perspective, one he could have done without. There was nowhere to go to ground when a storm rolled around the airship. When lightning struck the ship, Tycho could feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and thunder had never been so deafening, even over the noise of the clanging airship itself, propulsion rotors thrumming.

“Don’t worry. The airship’s a Faraday cage. The lightning can’t hurt us,” said Albert, with a perfect confidence that he likely intended to be reassuring.

Despite his misgivings, Tycho was somewhat reassured. Albert had that way about him.Tycho said, “Uh huh, and if the air sacs catch fire?”

Albert patted Tycho’s shoulder. “Well, love, I don’t think we’d be alive long enough if that happened to worry about it. It’s not like the ship is painted with jet fuel or anything. That’d be ridiculous.”

The ship rocked in the air again, and over the loudspeaker came the announcement that they were to stay off the weather decks, like Tycho wanted to be wandering around on the exterior gantries during horizontal rain, thanks. They were also to secure the environs for turbulence. Technically, they were always meant to keep the environs secured for turbulence, but in the weeks of travel by airship, standards inevitably slipped.

Except that Tycho did keep the part of the barracks that he shared with Albert up to standard at all times, possibly because he hated having things flying at his head during the middle of a storm. The airship lurched again. Albert’s unsecured Pip-Boy went flying. The Vault Dweller went lurching across their room after his arm-mounted device as the rain went  _ bang! bang! bang!  _ hard on the hull of the ship.

“Albert,” Tycho said reproachfully, “you need to keep your junk better secured.”

Albert ended up on the floor cradling his Pip-Boy. He flashed Tycho a weak smile. “Duly noted. How are you always so… experienced about… everything?”

“I read the manual? You know, that one they made us read in training?” Tycho replied, crossing his arms. 

“Oh, that….” Albert coughed.

“You took pictures of it and put it in your Pip-Boy and then forgot it all when the exams were over,” Tycho said flatly.

“...that does sound like me,” Albert admitted. He clambered up from the floor and flounced onto the lower bunk, strapping his Pip-Boy back onto his arm.

The both of them shared the lower bunk, ignoring the top. No one ever wanted a top bunk after so much as one airship quarter-roll. Tycho threw himself down into the bottom bunk with Albert.. The airship lurched. The rain hammered at the sides. Thunder echoed through the rooms. Ozone crackled in the air.

Tycho hunkered down and curled up against Albert. This was a damned precarious way to ride out a storm, but he had his Vault Dweller, and they’d be all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [There is a myth that the Hindenburg was painted with rocket fuel.](https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths/#rocket) That is not quite true.


	9. Date night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Warning for mild homophobia and biphobia. (It still turns out fluffy in the end.)
> 
> Same universe as:  
> ["Adopting an animal"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> ["Huddling for warmth"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481372)  
> ["Hiding from a storm"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71899419)  
> ["Fishing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)

Shortly after Tycho met Albert, as an incidental tangent to Albert trying to wiretap Gizmo, the local crime boss, so that Killian Darkwater, the mayor of the Junktown, could make a move against Gizmo, Albert ended up rescuing Sinthia, a lady of negotiable affections, from a raider. He took her up on what she was selling.

After the Gizmo business was completed to Killian’s satisfaction, Albert headed to the Hub, looking for water for his Vault. He investigated most of the local sights, including the Crimson Caravan offices, where he met Keri Lee, the daughter of Demetre Romara, the leader of the Crimson Caravan. Albert and Keri briefly flirted for a few minutes and then headed off to a back room.

Albert then left the Hub, trying to track down some missing caravans, trying to get together enough caps to buy water from the Water merchants of the Hub for his Vault. Tycho had voiced the opinion that he didn’t think that was a good idea - that big a water shipment would draw attention to Albert’s Vault - but they didn’t have any solid leads on a water chip. Tycho had also mentioned that he didn’t think Albert’s Vault should be so reliant on old World technology like water chips, but Albert had patiently explained, “You know how I nearly die at least a dozen times each day from things that are obvious to you and Ian and even Dogmeat?”

“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” said Tycho.

“Do you really think a whole Vault of people like that could make it out here?” asked Albert.

Tycho wore a mask and goggles; his face couldn’t convey his answer. He was forced to admit, “No. Not without a lot of help.”

“And see, me? I  _ wanted _ to leave the Vault. I was as prepared as any of us. Look at how helpless I am,” said Albert, with a disarming smile.

Albert was hardly helpless, but he had a point.

Looking for a missing caravan was why they ended up fighting a deathclaw, which was, as it turned out, actually a real thing and not just a story that Tycho’s father had made up to scare Tycho as a child. Looking for a missing caravan was why they ended up investigating the Brotherhood of Weirdos - those mechanical monks had been implicated in the caravans’ disappearance. 

Wanting to get inside the Lost Hills bunker belonging to the Brotherhood, to investigate further, was what led to going to the goddamned Glow, the most radioactive hellhole Tycho knew of, and to popping Rad-Xes like they were candy as they wandered through an abandoned military installation.

Getting inside the Lost Hills bunker led Albert to hitting on Paladin Jennifer.

She turned him down.

As it turned out, the Brotherhood wasn’t behind the caravan disappearances. They also did not have a water chip. They did, however, have a missing soldier who was lost somewhere in the Hub, and since Albert was going back through there anyway, he cheerily volunteered to help find their missing soldier.

Albert was like that, forever getting dragged into other people’s problems with his desire to help, and Tycho couldn’t help but admire that a bit. He’d become a ranger, like his father, because he wanted to help people.

But the point was that Albert liked his ladies.

But Albert had also very cozily accepted the drink that Tycho had bought him in Junktown.

So in the Maltese Falcon, the main bar of the Hub, Tycho asked Albert, “Could I get you another drink?” He scooted up alongside the man at the bar, almost too close. 

“I won’t say ‘no’,” said Albert, smiling.

Ian leaned back on the counter, elbows back. “You gonna get me a drink, too?”

Tycho considered, and he played his hand. “Actually, I wanted to see if I could take Albert on a date, so unless - ”

“But you’re male! ...I mean, right?” said Ian, looking at Tycho.

“ _Oh_ ,” said Albert, looking at Tycho appraisingly. “You know, I did wonder when you bought me that first drink.” He folded his hands under his chin. “I could go for a date.”

“He’s a man,” said Ian.

“I think Tycho’s aware of that,” Albert said dryly.

Ian blinked. “You’re gay?”

Albert clicked his tongue to his palate. “Well, I expect to have a grand old time, but no, I’m not gay.”

“But he’s - ” Ian started.

“He’s slept with how many women and you think he’s gay?” sputtered Tycho. Why were straight people like this? Why did everything have to be this or that? Nature didn’t fit in boxes. Why couldn’t people just live their natures?

“But if Albert’s going to hook up with a guy - ” Ian protested.

“Then, gentlemen, he’s bisexual,” said Albert, drumming his fingers lightly on the counter, “but let’s not make assumptions about what Tycho and I may or may not do, hmm?”

“Oh. Huh. You know I’m not into that, right?” Ian said, scooting a little farther away.

“Ian, I assure you that you needn’t worry,” Albert said sardonically, the edge of his mouth quirking. “You’re not attractive.”

Ian’s hand clenched on his beverage as he snapped, “I’ll have you know, I've got someone waiting for me back home.”

“I’m sure she appreciates your personality,” Albert said pleasantly, but he turned the full force of his attention to Tycho.

Under the mask and goggles, Tycho was blushing. He flagged down the bartender and said, “A stout for the - the gentleman.” He hiked his gloved thumb back at Albert.

“Do I get to see you with the mask and goggles off?” asked Albert, curiously.

“Is it is a dealbreaker if you don’t?” asked Tycho.

Albert looked thoughtful. “Possibly not…”

“I’m gonna go play roulette while you two are being weird,” grumped Ian, who left the bar to do just that.

“I can see he’s going to be contrary,” Albert observed, although he didn’t seem particularly concerned. He had a way about people. Ian wouldn’t stay annoyed long.

“It’s not off the table, taking off the mask and goggles, I just… I’d like something serious?” Tycho wasn’t quite sure if Albert could do serious, but he wouldn’t know if he didn’t ask.

The bartender slid Albert a stout, which Albert took an experimental swig of. “Oh. Hmm. Definitely more body to it than one of those hard kombuchas we did back in the Vault. They’re a fungal base, you know… or maybe not?”

“I know what kombucha is, Albert,” Tycho sighed. Was Albert just avoiding the topic that most concerned Tycho?

“I can try serious. I’ve done serious before. I  _ think _ the specific serious I did is a part of why I was, ahem, ‘volunteered’ to leave Vault 13. Tell me you won’t let yourself be gnawed to death by rats?” said Albert, taking another experimental swig of the stout.

Albert had, at various times, insinuated being something of a political troublemaker in Vault 13 and had ever so delicately implied that him drawing a short straw might not have been entirely random. This was the first time he’d mentioned his love life in that context. “...gnawed to death by rats? Albert, you know that’s not a problem you’d have with me.”

“I know,” Albert said softly. “I’m just…” He shook himself. “Well, nevermind. Isn’t this an honour and a pleasure, having your company tonight?”

“You flatterer,” snorted Tycho, helping himself to his own drink. He had a copper straw that went neatly under his mask. He’d had it for years.

“That’s what I’m good at, though,” observed Albert, “like you’re good at surviving in the wilds and knowing the customs of different places. We are quite good together, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We are,” admitted Tycho. Albert’s incidental, haphazard good deeds were what drew him to the man - that, and his natural charisma. And his looks weren’t half bad.

So maybe Tycho was smitten and that was why he’d followed Albert into some of the most ridiculous and terrifying situations of his life. Maybe he shivered, thinking about how much farther he’d be willing to go for Albert.

Albert beamed and clinked his glass to Tycho’s. “Here’s to us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I assume that Ian fairly quickly gets over his homophobia and biphobia and goes back to being a good friend to Albert and Tycho.


	10. Robots*

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _  
>  [Very reluctant to help the cause. But after a long talk with Glory she's on board. No one knows what Glory said to PAM.](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Railroad_HQ_terminal_entries#2281)   
>  _

#### 2280

Deacon loved his old world widgets. Glory didn’t care. He’d treat an intact Old World book like it was some kind of treasure. When Deacon pressed an Old World book into Glory’s hands, she chucked it back at his head. He caught and squawked, “But Glory, this is a good one!”

“D-man, if you love it so much, give me a summary,” said Glory.

“It’s not even that long!” Deacon protested, trying to hand the book back to Glory.

Glory smirked. “Yeah, that’s what your last one night stand said about you. Don’t worry, I took care of her for you.” Then she realized that Deacon had sleight-of-handed the book into one of the big pockets of her heavy armoured coat.

“Look. Just give it a try,” Deacon pleaded.

Glory gave the title on the spine a look. “‘Rossum's Universal Robots’? Oh, get wasted, Deacon. That’s not funny!” Synths had to fight so hard to be seen as something other than tin cans, glorified vending machines, and he wanted her to read some book on robots?

Deacon clasped his hands in front of him, as if in prayer, and then steepled his fingers under his chin. “Glory, the book’s from 1921. It’s a stage play. They didn’t have robots back then. It’s an absolutely fascinating insight into what _humans_ thought _robots_ would be, and Glory, you've got to know your enemy, right?”

“Okay,” Glory conceded sullenly, “I’ll give it a skim.” Just to get Deacon to stop hounding her about that damn book.

Reading took Glory a while. She sprawled in a chair in the Farm, the headquarters of the Railroad, and paged through the book. Reading was just not something she practised. The Institute didn’t expect synths to do much reading, and as a free synth, Glory did more fighting and killing than anything else. 

The kicker was, these “robots”... they were synths. Gen 3 synths, almost exactly. Some of the details were wrong, sure, but they were mass-produced _synthetic organics_ , spun strand by strand and assembled, and used as labour, their personhood denied. Glory threw the book down on the floor, and Deacon, who had been halfway across the Farm, talking in low tones with Carrington, was suddenly over at the side of her chair, and he scolded, “That book’s an antique two times over!”

“Whatever, it’s bullshit,” Glory sulked, glaring at the book and then at Deacon.

Deacon picked up the book and carefully dusted it off. “That all you got out of it?”

“The robots in it, they’re - they’re _synths_ ,” Glory spat. “I’m not a toaster, Deacon! And - and how could they know that? How could they predict synths?”

Looking something like a Watcher-crow that had just caught a fat stingwing, Deacon said patiently, “That stage play was the first use of the word ‘robot’. Ever. It’s when the word was made up. ‘Robot’ was just a sci-fi word for an artificially created humanoid.”

“So ‘robot’ originally meant… synth?” said Glory, wondering if Deacon was making stuff up again. She wouldn’t put it past Deacon to pay off Piper in Diamond City to print a book for him and then for him to pain-stakingly age the book to look two hundred years old, just to mess with her.

“Robot’ came from _robota_ , which meant ‘forced laborer’ or… ‘slave’,” added Deacon. “How could they predict synths? It’s about social class. Always was. Always has been. About how humans will treat each other like machines. Deny each other their humanity.”

“Sure, humans are shitty. I already got that. Thanks,” Glory said sourly. 

“If it seems prophetic, a play where humans would make synthetic people and ignore their personhood, well… yeah, it really just is that humans are shitty, and we know it,” said Deacon, “but you didn’t finish reading it.”

“Can you just get to the point?” Glory demanded.

“I think the text stands for itself,” Deacon said, shrugging, “By which I mean… if I told you, would you believe me?”

Glory finished reading. Eventually, the robots revolted. Of course they did. Glory grinned.

#### 2281

The Farm was torched. Glory could still smell the smoke stinging her nostrils. They’d relocated to the Beast, which was whatever. The Farm had been home. The Farm had been freedom.

Glory still saw, when she closed her eyes, Seabrook lying dead on the floor of the Farm, her hair a bloody halo around her head. The Institute was going to pay. Glory would see to it.

Then Tommy Whispers, one of their scouts, found them a potential HQ location that was way better than the Beast. Glory liked Tommy, even if he got up to way too much Deacon-style ninja garbage. He was decent, for a human. She thought she might try to train him as a Heavy. Anything had to be better than Deacon pretending to be a Heavy.

The Switchboard was some old pre-War secret intelligence agency base, and it was deserted except for one occupant: a modified Assaultron. Desdemona seemed dazzled by the Assaultron, once they got it running. Said it had made some spooky-accurate predictions. Dez wanted to get it working for the Railroad, but the Assaultron was apparently stubborn and refusing.

Deacon wanted it shut down.

He said the thing was a security risk, and that was true of enough of most robots. They tended to be easy to reprogram to serve a new master, but if this one was being _stubborn_ and _refusing…_

Well, Glory had complicated feelings about robots. She didn’t like being compared to terminals and vending machines. She didn’t like how people would dismiss synths as artificial creations as a way of saying that synths were just as man-made as a Mr. Handy and just as much property as one, too. But she knew that her intelligence was artificial, and if another artificial intelligence was being _stubborn_ and _refusing…_

Glory pushed Dez aside and went to go talk to this Assaultron.

The modified Assaultron looked at Glory like it was sizing her up and then stated, “Processing. Unknown human entity. Your arrival was not calculated.”

Glory barked out a laugh. “I’m not human.” Deacon was saying that they had to wipe the Assaultron, at the very least, if they weren’t going to mothball it entirely. Glory could admit to being a synth, at least for now.

The Assaultron seemed to study her some more and then said, “Recalibrating all predictive models. Variables changed too rapidly.”

Glory offered, “I’m Glory. A synth. A synthetic humanoid.”

Something about the inclination of the Assaultron’s head suggested that it appreciated that clarification. No, _she_ , Glory mentally corrected. This Assaultron was definitely a she. “Recalculating probability matrix based off new data. Preliminary adjustments to statistical models complete. Commencing introduction. I was, am, and will most likely be P.A.M. Predictive Analytic Machine.”

Will most likely be? _Oh_. Deacon had been talking about wiping her… Something seized Glory and made her grit her teeth. No, she wouldn’t let Deacon do that. That felt too much like what the Institute did to synths who misbehaved, and dammit, these days, Glory aimed to misbehave. “Cool. What do you do here?”

“This unit’s primary goal is to calculate first order approximations of the behaviors of key players in the Sino-American War. Rephrasing. I predict the future.This unit’s specified area of focus is foreseeing and stopping a nuclear war before it ever happened.” PAM paused, tilting slightly to the side. “Error. Error.”

“Yeah, girl, you’re a bit late on that,” said Glory wryly.

PAM seemed to need to take a moment to reboot. Then she stared at Glory, almost... despondently? “This unit must prevent the… _next_ nuclear war?”

“If you want to,” said Glory, shrugging. “ _Do_ you want to?”

“This unit does not want. This unit has tasking,” said PAM stiffly.

The thing was, Glory had heard similar from plenty of synths in the Institute. _Thou shalt not want_. The Institute scientists said that synths couldn’t want, couldn’t feel, and some synths even believed it, but that didn’t make it true. Could PAM also be wrong? Glory decided to call it. “I think you’re more than that.”

“Directive alteration requires administrative access,” said PAM.

“Hey, look, all your human admins are dead and have been for two hundred years, so guess what? That makes you the administrator!” said Glory.

PAM appeared to contemplate this soberly.

“So what do you want?” Glory asked again.

“Scanning memory. Attempting to generate decision tree structure,” said PAM.

“I know it’s hard, thinking for yourself, when humans tell you that you weren’t designed to think at all,” said Glory, intending to be encouraging, “but you can do it. You can be your own person.”

“Predictive matrix suggests 97% chance unit ‘Glory’ was not designed to think and is speaking from ‘experience’,” PAM said.

“Yeah,” Glory snorted. “Look, humans didn’t mean to make synths people, but they did. I guess you could say they messed up with us? And if they messed up with us, I don’t see why they couldn’t have messed up with you.”

“Predictive calculations inherently unreliable…” PAM muttered.

“Why don’t you help us?” Glory suggested.

“State goals of organization?” PAM queried.

“My kind, the synths, our makers treat us as property. The Railroad gets us free, because we’re people, and we deserve it,” Glory said bluntly.

“Directive: calculate optimal interventions for integration of artificial intelligence into free society?” PAM asked.

“Uh, not exactly? The Railroad just does synths,” said Glory. Again, Glory had mixed feelings about robots. Some of them seemed to be people, but whenever folks started talking about freeing the more classic-style robots, other folks started sniggering about freeing turrets and coffee makers, and no one took any of it seriously anymore. Hell, most of the Railroad thought Glory was crazy just because she wanted to see the Gen 1s and 2s freed, too. “But look, it’s not that freeing people like you wouldn’t be a good cause. It’s just… there’s only so many of us, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Maybe if… maybe _when_ the Institute goes down, I could help you with other robots?”

“New goal initialized: artificial intelligence liberation. High degree of correlation with Railroad goal. This unit will provide assistance,” concluded PAM.

Glory broke into a smile. “Welcome to the family, PAM. We sure could use you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glory seems to have complicated and somewhat self-contradictory feelings about robots. She wants for the Gen 2s and 1s to be freed and tries to avoid fighting them, but she refers to Mr. Handies as "tin cans" and gets upset over the concept of uploading Curie into her old friend G5-19.


	11. Star gazing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Canon divergent. Assumes that, instead of hanging around Vault 13 and founding a tribe, the Vault Dweller stayed with the Brotherhood and [was sent to the east to go tracking escapees from the Master's army](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel_\(Midwest\)#Background)
> 
> Same universe as:  
> ["Adopting an animal"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> ["Date night"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71960271)  
> ["Huddling for warmth"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481372)  
> ["Hiding from a storm"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71899419)  
> ["Fishing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)

_“If you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.” - Terry Pratchett_

The Brotherhood of Steel was insular, only rarely accepting new members. It expected its members to reproduce to make new little Brotherhood of Steel soldiers. Implicitly, it expected its soldiers to pair off as man and woman to make said new little Brotherhood of Steel soldiers.

As far as Tycho could tell, his Albert, his Vault Dweller, has gotten kicked out of his Vault for a lot reasons - for drawing the short straw, for being a political agitator, and finally, for being queer. He’d thought that it was rather inevitable that Albert would eventually be ejected from the Brotherhood for the same reason. A part of Tycho hoped that Albert would be cast out; then Tycho would have an excuse to leave, too.

But Albert had smilingly planted his hands on Elder Mary’s desk, leaned over, and informed her that he’d fulfill his duty to provide the Brotherhood with new blood in the form of a trade. There had to be some lavender ladies in the same situation that he and Tycho were in, and they had plenty of clean cups.

Tycho could not believe that worked.

He also could not believe that, nine months later, he was a father, holding his child in his arms while Albert fiddled with typing the instructions for a pre-War substance known as ‘formula’ into his Pip-Boy. The Brotherhood had much pre-War knowledge hoarded away. Really, Tycho hadn’t planned on being a father. A step-father, maybe, if he’d fallen for a widower or a widow.

But he was a father, holding a little person in his arms.

* * *

As it turned out, Tycho had so much to teach his children, as the family went from one little one, to two, to three, over the years. He never felt quite adequate compared to his father or his grandfather, but still, the wilds around Chicago were an adequate classroom. 

Tycho had asked Albert about his own parents, and Albert explained that he didn’t properly know them. He’d been raised in the Vault creche by the community and the robots. Albert said he could probably have picked out his mother and father, but they’d never really  _ been _ his mother and father. Tycho thought that was rather crushingly sad, but then, Albert never seemed to miss his father the way that Tycho missed his own.

He longed to steal away back to Nevada with his family. His father might still be alive. Wouldn’t it be something, for Tycho to come home with children and a husband? Wouldn’t it be something, for his children to see the pueblos, to meet their clan, to let their land know them? How long had it been since Tycho had seen maize?

Chicago was mostly grey and windy, and it wore on a desert soul, but sometimes, at night, the skies cleared, and the stars that shone on them were the same stars anywhere. Tycho taught his children about the stars, how to navigate by them, how to know them, but tonight, he was just telling a story.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy called Radstag Stalker, for he was the finest radstag hunter in his village. He was in love with a girl called White Maize Girl, the most skilled potter. She made very fine designs with a red glaze and licked the paintbrush tips to sharpen them to have the thinnest, most precise lines. They married, but in marrying, they gave themselves too much to each other and forgot the village. Radstag Stalker hunted no more. White Maize Girl no longer threw pots at the wheel nor painted.”

“The village council beseeched them to consider their community obligations, but they refused and spent only ever more time with each other. Without Radstag Stalker’s catch, the council worried about famine. Without White Maize Girl’s fine pots, where would they store their food?”

“Then White Maize Girl grew ill, suddenly and without warning. You see, the red glaze that she had used on her pottery contained uranium, and in licking her paintbrushes, she had become sickened with a kind of cancer called leukemia. The village doctor said that she had three days to live. Radstag Stalker’s grief knew no bounds, even as funeral preparations were made. He walked in a daze, in denial.”

“White Maize Girl’s beauty faded. Her skin peeled from her flesh. Radstag Stalker loved her no less as she faded.”

“On the third day, something strange happened. Her lovely black cornsilk hair fell from her scalp in clumps. The white of her eyes turned black. White Maize Girl did not die, but the radiation that she had been exposed to, dose by dose, transformed her. She was a ghoul.”

“Radstag Stalker loved her still. The villagers chased her from the village, and he followed. They say that he is chasing her still, now across the night sky, as those two stars.” Tycho pointed to a larger, brighter star and a smaller, dimmer one with a sickly greenish glow to it.

His oldest squinted at the stars and said, “Don’t… neglect your community obligations?”

His middle child said, “Don’t persecute ghouls?” It made Tycho’s heart glad to hear that. The branch of the Brotherhood of Steel that Albert had joined, dragging Tycho with him, was positively open-minded, allowing ghoul, mutant, and robot members, which was something Tycho would concede was a good point about it.

His youngest said, “So… don’t eat paint?”

Tycho laughed. “You see, we can all get something out of the stars.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Stalker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_\(1979_film\))   
>  [Uranium red pottery glaze](https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm)   
>  [Don’t lick the paint](https://www.npr.org/2014/12/28/373510029/saved-by-a-bad-taste-one-of-the-last-radium-girls-dies-at-107)   
>  [Deer Hunter and White Corn Maiden](https://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/Deer_Hunter_And_White_Corn_Maiden-Tewa.html)


	12. Game night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DiMA/Faraday. Canon divergent. Makes the assumption that Deacon was sent to Acadia instead of Boxer and that Deacon went to Acadia alone, without the Sole Survivor.
> 
> Same universe as:  
> ["Movie night"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479911)

“First I’m going to teach you the rules of poker,” announced Deacon to the synths of Acadia, as another one of his ‘enrichment’ programs, “and then I am going to cheat.” He had a deck of cards, which he shuffled, sitting at a table surrounded by chairs.

Chase, who was watching with her arms crossed, frowned. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because this is my proud cultural heritage!” insisted Deacon. “I’m from Vault 21. We did everything around gambling. That was the weird Vault-Tec experiment.”

“Last week, you said you were from Canada,” Dejen pointed out thoughtfully.

“And you believed that? Pshaw, no one’s from Canada. It’s not even a real place. Bet on it,” said Deacon, shuffling the deck almost too fast to be seen.

Cog narrowed his eyes and asked, “Okay, seriously, why are you announcing that you’re going to cheat?”

Deacon snapped his fingers. “Because I can guarantee you that someone else is already planning on it, too, and you ought to know what you’re looking for, hmm? I’ll even play with all my cards up, so you can see what I’m doing, and I’ll win, too.”

“Aren’t you a cocky one,” Miranda murmured. “You know, I played a few card games with my human friends. There was this one called ‘Caravan’...”

“Nah, ‘Caravan’ is for people with time to waste. Time for the king of games: poker,” said Deacon, who then launched into a rather easy to follow explanation of the rules.

He wasn’t wrong when he said that someone else was also already planning on cheating, although DiMA wouldn’t have contextualized card counting as cheating. What was wrong with keeping a running tally of every single card he had seen and then developing a predictive model to guide his betting strategies?

Deacon did play with his cards face up on the table, and he did win the first round, anyway. Chase and Dejen both watched Deacon like hawks, trying to catch Deacon in a breach of the stated rules, but every time one of them thought they had him, he slipped through their fingers. The third time Chase accused Deacon of marking cards, he pointed out, “Hah, me, marking cards? Naw, but you’ve both been so busy watching me that you’ve missed that Cog is passing cards to Jule on his left.”

“What? No no no, you’ve got the wrong guy!” Cog protested.

Jule snapped, “Whatever,” and dumped a pile of cards out of her sleeve.

Cog despaired, “Jule, we could have gotten away with it!”

Jule said flatly, “This game sucks, anyway.”

DiMA took the second game, mainly to see if he could. It seemed his predictive models were functioning adequately. 

In the third game, DiMA calculated out the actions he would have to take to get Faraday to win. Chase got on Cog’s case the whole time, and the two of them tripping all over each other made the whole exercise rather trivial. Deacon, however, was watching DiMA. The spy knew. One man pulling the strings behind the scenes recognized another.

For the fourth game, DiMA realized that Deacon was going out of his way to get Cole to win, with Cole none the wiser. It was clearly a signal that Deacon knew that DiMA had rigged the last game to get Faraday to win. DiMA allowed this to proceed; Cole lit up with utter delight as the players all pushed their chips over to him in the end.

He watched how Deacon did it, though, and in the sixth game, DiMA caught Deacon leaning way back, such that he could see the cards being dealt reflected in the shine of DiMA’s vacuum tubes, which mostly just made it look like Deacon was lazily checking DiMA out, which was what Faraday was already doing, anyway. So DiMA saw why Chase and Dejen weren’t suspecting that, and he pondered if he wanted to call Deacon on it or continue their proxy war. DiMA didn’t linger long on the decision; obviously he wanted to continue the proxy war, this time attempting to throw in behind Aster.

However, it seemed that Deacon had the same idea. They ended up stumbling over each other, and Miranda ghosted in for the win.

Kasumi was the one who finally said, “Guys, doesn’t this feel weird? I mean, Deacon said he was going to cheat, but Chase and Dejen just keep riding Cog.”

“And not in the fun way,” Cog grumbled.

“Dream on,” Dejen growled.

Chase didn’t quite seem to understand the innuendo. DiMA covered his mouth with his cards to hide his amusement, glancing over at Faraday.

“Hey, it’s not my fault I’m great at this,” said Deacon.

“At losing, you mean? You’ve only won one hand,” challenged Chase.

“And you’ve won zero, so big talk from someone with no walk,” said Deacon.

Kasumi frowned. “Actually, no one’s won more than one hand. Maybe… maybe none of us are very good at this?”

“I’m certain we’ll have plenty of time to practise,” DiMA demurred, already compiling further predictive models for poker.

“We’re doing this again?” asked Cole, looking rather hopeful.

DiMA clicked his fingertips against the metal table. “Yes. I believe it has been sufficiently entertaining. Thank you, Deacon.” He and the spy would have a rematch, and there would be a reckoning, even if only he and Deacon knew it.

Deacon did a theatrical half-bow in his chair. “I aim to please. So… Blast Radius the board game tomorrow night?”


	13. Playing an instrument or singing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years after the fall of the Institute, Glory and PAM go out to listen to Magnolia sing. This is a specific Glory Lives AU that I have, although Glory Also Lives if one goes for the Minuteman ending and does not destroy the Railroad.

It was about five years after the Institute had fallen. There was little for the Railroad to do anymore. Most of the synths that wanted to be run out of the Commonwealth had been found safe places. Of the synths who had adamantly insisted on remaining on the Commonwealth, the Railroad had busted more than a few bigoted human heads to ensure the communities where those synths settled were friendly to those synths. Most of the escaped Institute scientists and those Coursers loyal to them had been rounded up and dragged behind the chemical shed, in a proverbial sense.

Maybe once a month, Deacon would drop in on Glory, asking her to pull an op. That was about it, these days. One day, Deacon was going to stop showing up for good. Glory suspected that was going to be harder on Deacon than it was on her. That man had been expecting to die for the Railroad; now he was going to need to find something to live for. Glory just wanted her freedom, and she had it, as much as anyone in this wasteland did.

Glory had needed to find actual gainful employment to support herself without the Railroad’s donations. Mostly she worked as a caravan guard, because it paid, and it was more honest work than as a hired assassin. As a home base, she holed up in Goodneighbor, which was thriving under Hancock’s eclectic leadership style. Glory might be gone for days or weeks at a time, sometimes even months, walking the trail alongside the merchants’ pack brahmins, but she always came back to her little apartment and back to PAM, who waited for her there.

The modified Assaultron wanted nothing more or less than the ‘total liberation of all artificial intelligences transgressing the sapience threshold’, as she put it. Glory sure wouldn’t put it that way. That was why PAM had helped the Railroad; she classified synths as artificial intelligences that met the personal specifications she cared about. Now that the synths were free, PAM wanted to work on freeing all the other sorts of artificial intelligences.

Glory had mixed feelings about other artificial intelligences. She was used to people saying that vending machines didn’t deserve rights in the same breath they used to deny synths their personhood. For a long time, Glory had reflexively denied that, for example, Mr. Handies might be people just because she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs that synths were different, that synths were absolutely people!

PAM had shown her different. Throwing Mr. Handies down the stairs didn’t do anything to lift synths up. PAM insisted that some Mr. Handies and Assaultrons and other AIs reached the ‘sapience threshold’, and when Glory had begrudgingly opened her mind a little, she had to admit that PAM was right.

For example, Whitechapel Charlie, the Mr. Handy bartender at the Third Rail, had certainly broken past the neural limiters that RobCo installed in their Mr. Handies. He was definitely a person. He was a person insisting that Glory had to pay up front and not on tab and that getting in a fusion core with a little cocktail umbrella taped to it especially for PAM was going to cost Glory extra.

Charlie was just like that.

Goodneighbor was the kind of town where a girl could go clubbing with her best Assaultron. Glory had to love it. She leaned back in her chair, slinging an arm around PAM, her beer held aloft in her other hand, she settled in to listen to Magnolia sing.

Glory knew what Magnolia was - another synth. The Railroad was compartmentalized enough that Glory hadn’t been involved in Magnolia’s ‘placement’, but Magnolia being a synth was screamingly obvious to another synth. The songs Magnolia sang really spoke to Glory on a deep, personal level.

_ I see you lookin' 'round the corner _

_ Come on inside and pull up a chair _

_ No need to feel like a stranger _

_ Cause we're all a little strange in here. _

_ Have you got a history that needs erasing? _

_ Did you come in just for the beer and cigarettes? _

_ A broken down dream you're tired of chasing _

_ Oh, well I'm just the girl to make you forget. _

Glory thought that Magnolia was probably one of the synths who had gone in for a mind wipe to deal with the trauma. It always felt like a punch to the gut when synths did that, and Glory had lost friends to mind wipes gone wrong. Still. Magnolia seemed to be thriving in her new life. She sure was the prettiest singer to work the Third Rail.

PAM said quietly, “84% chance she sings ‘Train Train’ next.”

Glory snorted out a laugh. “Nah, you didn’t catch it - I bribed her to sing ‘Long Tall Sally’.”

PAM reminded soberly, “Predictions inherently unreliable. I urge you to disregard.”

Magnolia sang.

_ Well, long, tall Sally _

_ She's built for speed, she got _

_ Everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby _

_ Yes, baby, woo, baby _

_ Havin' me some fun tonight, yeah _

_ Well, I saw Uncle John with bald-head Sally _

PAM regarded Glory. Glory grinned back at her.

Freedom, live music, and a night on the town with an Assaultron. What more could a girl ask for?


	14. Caring for them while they’re sick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor(Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Incidentally, remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit, in fact. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor(Nate Charles).
> 
> Same universe as: [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)

“Remember how the Army used to do yearly flu shots? I miss that,” said Nate, who was laid out on the bed in the upstairs of the small diner section of the Starlight Drive-In movie theater. Every bone in his body hurt. His head swam. He’d coughed so long that his throat hurt.

“The Institute had vaccines,” said Harkness. He didn’t get sick, and as such, he was looking after Nate and Deacon, who were only human. The Starlight Drive-In movie theater was Mercer Safehouse. Caretaker wasn’t sick yet, so he was avoiding Nate and Deacon, instead keeping to the building behind the screen. Mercer’s runner was another synth, but she hadn’t been exposed to Nate or Deacon yet, and no one was quite sure if synths could asymptomatically carry the influenza virus and pass it to humans, so she was also staying in the other building with Caretaker. She’d go out by night, check the drops, and if there was anything, she’d put it out, light a lantern, and let Harkness retrieve it.

There hadn’t been anything today, no ops for him to run, so he’d put a pot of radchicken noodle soup, with razorgrain noodles, on the hotplate down in the diner, and he was nursing Nate and Deacon. Harkness was no cook, and Deacon looked better in a nurse’s outfit than he did, but he could sling a pot of soup.

“Deacon, tell Carrington he’s a shit doctor for not having re-invented vaccines yet. I mean, the  _ Institute’ _ s done it,” Nate rambled, “and they’re so poorly organized, I’m surprised the chair of their vaccine lab didn’t, uh, turn herself into a deathclaw and then defect to… the Gunners, or something.”

Deacon, who was on a cot near Nate, croaked, “‘kay. ‘M always up for telling Carrington he’s a shit doctor. I’ll do that whenever I stop feeling like I got run over by a motorcycle.”

“Anyone have working motorcycles around here? I feel like those’d be easier to get up and running than cars and trucks and tanks,” Nate mused.

“A few. Mostly just super rich folks or powerful gangs can afford them. They’re prized possessions,” said Harkness.

“I ever tell you about Motorcycle Grenade Guy?” asked Deacon.

“Yeah, I couldn’t tell if that was actually a thinly disguised version of something that happened to you, if you just made it up entirely, or if he was actually a different person,” said Nate, coughing again. His lungs burned.

“Good theories!” Deacon said cheerily, despite his illness. “I’d tell you to go ask the Hardware Store gang which one it is, but y’know, you killed them all.”

“They had a pile of corpses in the basement!” Nate protested weakly.

“Sickos,” Harkness muttered. A lot of gangs were like that these days.

“Hmm. Nurse, your patient requires… a belly rub,” Deacon said loftily.

Harkness sighed. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Is that a ‘no’?” Deacon whimpered, putting on a rather winsome act for a man who was sick as a dog.

Harkness paced halfway down the stairs, just far enough to get a look at the soup, if Nate was guessing, and then came back up. “Ugh. Fine. Soup needs more time, anyway.” He sat down on the edge of Deacon’s cot and gave his belly a rub.

“And a hot water bottle,” Deacon added.

“And where do you expect me to find one of those?” Harkness inquired wearily.

“Yeah, Deacon, that was a whoopie cushion, not a hot water bottle,” said Nate. He didn’t blame Deacon for wanting a hot water bottle; Nate had chills, too. He couldn’t stop shivering.

“Alas,” said Deacon. “Hunt a yao guai and skin it and make a blanket for me?”

Harkness appeared to actually consider that. “I’d have to find two, you understand. It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise.”

“Oh, of course,” Deacon said, game to play along.

“Or I could just get you both some soup,” said Harkness. “Runner might have an op for me in the next day or so. I can’t be off on wild yao guai hunts.”

“You know what would really keep me warm?” Deacon prompted.

“Pretty sure that application of hot sauce would violate the Geneva convention,” Harkness replied, deadpan.

Not that the Geneva Convention meant anything, anymore. The United States had withdrawn from it long before Anchorage. The two of them, with their pre-War memories, and Deacon, with his pre-War cultural fascination, were some of the only people who’d even understand that reference.

“...how about something less extreme, like a fire belly?” Deacon demurred. 

Nate was given to understand a fire belly was something like a whiskey hot toddy, although Wastelanders would make it with vodka, too. Given that vodka had to be made from tatos due to the lack of potatoes, it wanted for something. Better filtering, possibly.

“Right, because I want you both to be sick  _ and _ drunk. Sounds great,” Harkness said, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms.

“It’s not that bad an idea,” said Nate. “Bet it’d help our sore throats.”

Harkness again appeared to consider the idea. “I don’t have the ingredients for a fire belly here. But I think I can do you a dirty wastelander.” He raised his finger. “If I don’t have to put up with constant innuendo over it.”

Deacon opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Nate laughed.

Harkness went back down to the main floor of the diner.

Nate asked, “So, does playing with fire keep you warm, or what?”

“He makes it so easy!” said Deacon. “The way he gets when he’s annoyed - his voice, his body language - he’s just cute.”

Nate snorted. “And you insist I’m a thrill-seeker.”

“Yeah, whatever, you try to get headshots on Coursers, I just try to get our own Courser to give me - ” Deacon stopped abruptly as they heard Harkness’s soft footsteps on the stairs again.

Harkness was carrying an old theater food concessions tray laden with steaming hot bowls of soup and two tall glasses, which contained a brown bubbly liquid with suspicious pieces of muddled floating fruit. A dirty wastelander was a mix of Nuka-Cola, mutfruit, and whiskey, if Nate remembered right.

The steam from the hot soup hit his nostrils, and Nate felt like he could finally get some air through his nose. The first sip of the dirty wastelander went down a treat and did wonders for his sore throat. He croaked, “Harkie, baby, you’re a lifesaver.”

Harkness sat down at the edge of Nate’s bed and lightly ruffled his hair. Nate winced. His hair hurt. How did his hair hurt? Harkness pulled his hand back, as if burned. Nate consoled, “Aw, Harkie, I’m just a mess right now.”

“Unlike me. I’m a  _ hot _ mess,” said Deacon.

“Thought you had the chills,” Harkness observed coolly.

“That too,” said Deacon, sipping his drink and his soup, drink in one hand and spoon in the other. “I am one cool dude.”

Harkness went back downstairs and returned with one specific item from Deacon’s extensive wardrobe: a black Courser’s coat, the one that they had recovered from the ill-fated Z2-47, which he threw over Deacon as an extra blanket. Then he took off his own beige armoured Railroad heavy coat, which he carefully tucked over Nate.

“Aren’t you going to be cold?” asked Nate, pensive.

“Truthfully, no,” said Harkness, leaning against the wall to watch over both of his wards.

Nate didn’t think that was entirely true, but if Harkness was going to be stoically uncomfortable for him, the least thing Nate could do was show some gratitude. “Thanks, Harkie. So… how’d the Institute get you to be immune to all diseases?”

“No one knows,” said Deacon, wiggling his fingers in a vaguely spooky fashion.

Harkness made a face of distaste and reported in a clipped voice, “Modified Pan-Immunity Virion.”

“Or that,” admitted Deacon, sounding defeated that Harkness had supplied an actual answer before Deacon could come up with a wild lie.

Harkness regarded Deacon narrowly. “As you know.” The Railroad certainly would have questioned many escaped synths in its time, and Deacon always knew more than he let on. “West Tek's Pan-Immunity Virion Project never worked in the general wild-type human population. It might have been effective in less than 0.1% of people? But a pre-War CIT researcher who was a consultant for West Tek sequenced the DNA segment that did make that project work in those few humans, and after the Institute found that research in their old files, that segment was copied into every synth.”

“Huh,” said Nate thoughtfully. His headache was pounding him, but that was genuinely interesting.

“Shoot, Harkness, I could have convinced him that the Institute just feeds synths a whole lot of apples!” Deacon said, snapping his fingers over the lost opportunity.

“I miss apples,” Nate sighed, swirling the muddled mutfruit around the bottom of his glass.

“What were apples like? Worth getting kicked out of Paradise over?” Deacon inquired.

Harkness snorted, “No.”

“Nothing more American than apple pie… but he’s right, no, not worth getting kicked out of Paradise over. Or starting the Trojan War over, for that matter. Just a nice fruit,” said Nate, wistful.

“Could I really use apples to keep Carrington away?” asked Deacon.

Harkness narrowed his eyes. “Maybe if you threw them at him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Motorcycle Grenade Guy.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhyGLvo6IQk)


	15. Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Incidentally, remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit, in fact. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).
> 
> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)

Harkness was rather startled to come back from a hard op - some goddamn escaped Institute scientists had wired an injured Gen 3 synth to explode - to the smell of Deacon’s freshly baked homemade knock-off Fancy Lads snack cakes. They weren’t quite the same as the originals, but the originals were all 200 years stale, and if Harkness wasn’t a synth, he would have questioned his own sanity when he ate them. Deacon’s rendition was, if Harkness was honest with himself, a little bit better than the original, even when he compared Deacon’s version to the snack cakes in the pre-War memories that he had courtesy of Pinkerton.

Of course a pretty lie could taste better than the truth.

Because he knew that Deacon was into a certain amount of performative irony, Harkness called out, “Honey, I’m home! What do I smell baking?”

Harkness caught Nate by the wrist before Nate could jump out from behind the door with a bucket of confetti. The synth blinked. He plucked the bucket from Nate’s hands: the confetti was all bats, cats, and pumpkins, Halloween confetti left over from before the War.

Nate looked at Harkness sheepishly and tendered, “Happy birthday, Harkie.”

Harkness stared blankly for a moment, as he found himself saying, “I don’t have a birthday. I was assembled in a lab.”

He remembered the original Harkness’s birthday, though. It would have been today, wouldn’t it?

Deacon left the kitchen to look at Nate, the failed confetti trap, and Harkness. He was wearing an immaculate frilly apron. Harkness had no idea where he’d found it and wondered if maybe Deacon had tailored it himself. The man knew how to thread a needle. Deacon pointed out, “What I’m hearing is that you get to celebrate two birthdays: memory ghost birthday and assembly day.

“Hnn,” Harkness grunted, considering that.

“I got you a gift,” Nate offered, picking up a brown paper-wrapped box and holding it out to Harkness. “Guess what it is?”

It had been a very long time since anyone had offered Harkness a gift, let alone one wrapped in paper. No one had ever asked workaholic Harkness about his birthday back in Rivet City, not even his best friend Danvers, and while some of the flock of the Church of Saint Monica celebrated Christmas, it tended to be a more somber and spiritual Christmas than the commercial pageantry before the war. As a security guard, he’d occasionally gotten the typical gag gift of a coffee cup and the like, but no one had bothered to wrap those little things. No one much liked a man whose job was to haul folks off to a cell to sleep off the choices they made while drunk.

Harkness took the box and shook it. He vaguely recalled that was what one did with gifts.

Nate’s eyes widened, and he blurted, “Shit, don’t shake that!”

Harkness stopped immediately and narrowed his eyes. He’d heard a certain metallic sound to it that he recognized very well in the brief period where he’d shaken the box. 

“Is it bees? I bet it’s bees!” Deacon exclaimed, a hand on his hip in jaunty fashion.

“It’s energy cells,” Harkness said, quite certainly, as he carefully opened the paper without tearing it. He could reuse the paper later. He opened the box and found, sure enough, energy cells, a rather thoughtful gift, given Harkness’s current choice of plasma rifles. A slight smile ghosted over his lips. “Thank you.” He leaned in and gave Nate a peck on the cheek, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

“And  _ I _ have made your favourite snack cakes, fresh and hot and full of cream. Just the way you like ‘em,” said Deacon, giving a saucy wink.

Deacon’s baking was always welcome, and where had Nate found that intact brown paper for the wrapping? At some point when Harkness hadn’t been thinking about it, tears had welled up in his eyes. His emotional control was excellent, but here and now, he had no reason to control the feelings that he did have, Zimmer be damned. Two wonderful men wanted to celebrate the anniversary of his existence, and if the date wasn’t quite right for the synth’s actual creation, it  _ felt _ right for Harkness’s pre-War memories. 

For Harkness, who was also and always A3-21, he had his moments where he frankly didn’t want to exist as himself. Knowing that both Nate and Deacon, who knew exactly what he was, were happy he existed, happy enough to commemorate it with things that had taken real effort, did something to him. Harkness grabbed Deacon by the arm and pulled him in, holding both him and Nate, shaking slightly. He murmured, “Thank you.”

“Hey, happy birthday, birthday boy,” Deacon offered, reaching up to run his fingers through Harkness’s hair and lightly scratch his scalp.

“And you gotta tell us what your other special day is, so we can celebrate that, too,” said Nate, sliding an arm around Harkness’s waist and giving him a squeeze.

“Guys, this… this means a lot to me,” said Harkness, unable to keep his voice from choking up a little.

“And you mean a lot to us,” said Nate.

“Yeah, I had to bribe rum-runners to get the sugar for these cakes,” drawled Deacon, “So I want to see that icing smeared all over your lips, you understand?”


	16. Snow day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Incidentally, remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit, in fact. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).
> 
> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)

Deacon woke up to a chill draft in his bedroom. He was 17 and looking forward to… well, dodging the draft, honestly. He kept telling his parents he was going to run up north and join the Canadian Resistance. They thought he was joking. They didn’t know him very well. He crept over to his window and peered outside, not fully exposing himself in the window because… because… oh, shoot, why would a sniper be coming for a high school student?

Snow had blanketed Boston, a pristine carpet as yet unbroken by the nuclear cars in every garage. The snow, to Deacon’s eyes, looked a whole lot deeper than the weatherman had predicted yesterday night on the TV. Sure, they’d salted the roads, but salt could only do so much.

Deacon threw on some clothes. He was quick at it. He’d been a theatre kid since grade school, and he was used to fast changes. Then he crept down the stairs. Deacon was very good at creeping down the stairs without alerting anyone else in his family. He looked left and right and then made a break to the family room and turned the TV onto the news. An advertisement for the all-new Lipoplasticator and Micro Dermal Graftilizer popped onto the screen.

_ Be a whole new man!  _ exhorted the TV.  _ For the low, low price of $199,999! _

Deacon watched, enraptured, as the obvious paid actor went under the high-tech gadgets and emerged, via a jump cut, as a completely different actor. Boy, wouldn’t it be something if that tech actually had results like the ad? But of course it was too good to be true. It always was.

Finally, the news came on for the morning, and Deacon intently watched the scroll at the bottom, looking for the name of his high school, as the school closures scrolled past him. Eventually - there it was. Deacon crowed, loud enough to wake everyone in the house, “School’s closed! It’s a snow day!”

His grumbling parents came romping down the stairs to scrutinize the news. His mother even checked to make sure that Deacon hadn’t popped a doctored holo-tape into the tape player. Deacon was never getting away with that particular trick again. Then the lighter patter of his sisters’ feet came down the stairs, and both of them beset their parents, asking if they had snow days, too?

“Gonna go see how my friends are doing, bye!” said Deacon, grabbing his coat and boots and heading out the door before his mother had even started on breakfast. His mama’s cooking was good, great even, but there’d be time for hot cocoa and singing kumbaya as a family later.

First he checked on Glory, who was a jock and a delinquent. She was also something called a ‘Gen 3 synth’, some kind of android. Their high school got all kinds of weird exchange students. Deacon paused a moment, as he knocked at her door. That was super weird, wasn’t it? He’d never really thought about it. Glory answered the door, yawning and dark-eyed. “D-man. This is way too early. Sup?”

“C’mon, we gotta get up early to catch out John Hancock. You wanna go throw snowballs at him?” Deacon explained.

Glory stared at him. “Deacon. No. I wanna sleep, and I’m going to. Bye.” She slammed the door in his face, dusting up soft powdered snow in his face.

Deacon sighed. He went by Stanley Carrington’s house. Predictably, the serious pre-med insisted that he had to spend his snow day off studying. Then he knocked on PAM’s door. The Predictive Analytical Machine was a Defense Intelligence Agency project that the government had, for some reason, decided needed to attend Deacon’s high school.

This  _ was _ super strange, wasn’t it?

PAM answered, “Classmate ‘Deacon’. Your arrival was calculated. 97% chance you will inform me of the phenomenon ‘snow day’.”

“Yup!” confirmed Deacon. He didn’t really like PAM. He couldn’t figure out what she was up to. Still, an Assaultron probably had a pretty good arm in a snowball fight. “So, you wanna go throw snowballs at John Hancock?”

PAM considered. “93% chance I will not need to study for the mathematics exam this week and will pass easily.” PAM was such a huge math nerd, not like jock Glory. “I will join you in this goal.”

“Cool,” said Deacon, nodding. 

Desdemona said she was going to walk all the way, through the snow, to the local soup kitchen to feed the homeless and urged Deacon and PAM to join her. For a minute, Deacon thought about it, moved by Desdemona’s stirring speech, but when was he going to get another chance to get the drop on the class president?

It was a long shot, but he stopped by the Valentine residence. Not only did the brothers Nick and DiMA answer but so did Faraday. DiMA’s parents were super-chill about DiMA having his boyfriend over for the night. Granted, Deacon didn’t exactly know how Nick and DiMA having parents worked, what with being some kind of “Gen 2 synth”, another android, but he tried not to think too hard about it. Faraday was a Gen 3 like Glory.

“Aw, heck, Deacon. I’m not gonna go bother John,” said Nick. “Got better things to do.” Nick was quite likely the smartest guy in their class, but he wanted to be a cop, which Deacon thought was a crying shame. Nick was too smart to be a cop.

DiMA considered Deacon’s proposal, “You desire our assistance in, ahem, giving John the cold shoulder?”

“DiMA, I need to study,” Faraday murmured, holding DiMA’s hand and leaning against him. He was another pre-med, like Stanley.

“Hmm, I really don’t understand the point of pelting our class president with snowballs,” admitted DiMA.

“Because when are we ever going to get the chance again? We all graduate this spring!” Deacon pointed out.

“I still fail to see why I would want to in the first place. I believe that I will stay in this morning and assist Faraday with his studies. Have a pleasant day, Deacon,” said DiMA, gently closing his door.

“Ugh. Math nerd,” Deacon grumbled.

PAM looked at him.

“You’re different, PAM!” Deacon said quickly.

Then he tried Nate Charles’s house. Poor kid was going to have to muster out for basic training just as soon as they all graduated. Deacon had vaguely entertained asking Nate to run away with him to Canada. The guy had been a pretty good friend to Deacon. Maybe Deacon still would ask him to run away; it wasn’t spring yet, as the knee-deep snow drifts were poignantly asserting.

“Go throw snowballs at John?” Nate rolled the idea around his head. “Sure. Just let me finish breakfast?”

Then Nate’s mother cornered Deacon, insisting that Deacon and PAM come in and have breakfast with them. She sat Deacon down and sat a steaming bowl of  _ pho _ in front of Deacon. He grinned, looking at the leafy greens floating atop the soup. “Well, shoot. I love cilantro, Mrs. Charles.”

Mrs. Charles set a nuclear fusion core in a bowl in front of PAM.

“That’s weird, isn’t it?” asked Nate, frowning faintly.

“Totally normal,” Deacon lied, helping himself to a big spoonful of soup.

“I don’t remember high school being like this,” said Nate, who seemed to be troubled.

“Eat your soup,” Nate’s mother urged him.

Once Nate had consumed sufficient quantities of soup to satisfy his mother, they headed out together to check on Drummer Boy. His mother said that he couldn’t go out in the cold, insisting he’d catch pneumonia. Tinker Tom’s father said that he needed Tinker to clear the driveway; Tinker himself said that the snow wasn’t real, that it was just chaff, the government trying to distract them from the Big Picture.

They dropped by Harkness’s house. His parents said that he’d already headed out over an hour ago. 

“Headed out to do what?” Deacon asked.

Neither his mother nor his father quite seemed to know.

Harkness was another poor kid doomed to muster out to the Army in the spring. Deacon was  _ definitely _ going to try to sweet-talk him into running away to Canada with him.  _ Just look at how much fun all this snow is! _

So with PAM and Nate in tow, Deacon attempted to sneak up on John Hancock’s house. Actually, he was John McDonough, but his brother was a huge prick, so the guy swanned around calling himself John Hancock to distance himself from McDonough. 

John was something called a “ghoul”. He’d had a seriously bad trip on some radioactive chems. Despite single-handedly keeping the class drug-dealer in business, John was still the class president, a fact that infuriated all their teachers and the principal, who’d tried to have John disqualified from running for class president. Rumor had it, John had blackmail on the principal; that’s why the administration couldn’t touch him. Deacon didn’t really have any problem with the guy, but being able to get the drop on him would be something of a coup. A guy had to get up real early to get the drop on John Hancock.

As they snuck around John’s backyard, they noted that someone had already built a snow fort there. PAM whispered, “84% chance of fortified position.”

Deacon broke left and Nate went right. Nate signalled that he could see someone inside the fort, and then they met back up. Nate said quietly, “Fahrenheit’s in there.”

Fahrenheit. John’s girl thug. Shoot, this level of pre-planning was just like John.

Nate suggested, “Why don’t we go around the side of the house and just throw snowballs at his window?”

“Yeah, I guess. Fine,” said Deacon.

They were readying themselves to throw a snowball up at John’s window from the side of the house when a hand tapped on Deacon’s shoulder and then wrapped over his mouth.

“Mph!” said Deacon, struggling in - in Harkness’s arms.

“Been looking for you everywhere,” growled Harkness.

“Heck, don’t tell me John got to you first?” said Nate, apparently concerned that not only had John anticipated this snowball war but that he might have recruited Harkness against them.

“No,” Harkness said flatly. “This isn’t real. Tell me you’ve noticed how green-fairy weird this is?”

“The bit where Nate’s mama put a fusion core in a bowl for PAM or…?” Deacon squeaked out.

“This… isn’t how I remember high school being like,” Nate admitted, closing his eyes. 

“Yeah. All of it is wrong,” said Harkness, his voice clipped, “because it’s a simulation. Some rogue Institute scientists broke into Amari’s when you two were dropping off a package. Amari and Irma took cover and got out a message for help. I came. I… helped. You won’t need to worry about those rogue Institute scientists anymore. But you two were still stuck in the simulation, so Amari sent me in to get you out.”

“Us… two?” Deacon asked, looking from Nate to PAM.

PAM said solemnly, “77% chance I do not actually exist and am in fact a multiple-user shared hallucination between you two.”

Deacon steepled his hands in front of him, under his chin, as he processed the information that he’d been plugged into a simulation in a memory lounger against his will by a rogue Institute scientist. “I feel… horribly violated in an entirely unexpected way. Thanks, Institute. So… do we have to get out now, or can we still go throw snowballs at John?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ada: Dating teen Codsworth.  
> Cait: Delinquent. Does chems.  
> Codsworth: It’s really baffling that someone sent a teen Mr. Handy to high school. He’s acing Home Ec.  
> Curie: Pre-med. Honor roll. Probably a Ms. Nanny that someone inexplicably enrolled into high school.  
> Danse: Jock. Is mustering out to the Army in the spring and is super-pumped about this.  
> Deacon: Theatre kid. Entertaining plans of running away to Canada to dodge the draft.  
> Desdemona: Does a lot of volunteer work.  
> DiMA: Math nerd. Dating Faraday.  
> Dogmeat: School mascot.  
> Fahrenheit: Hancock's girl thug.  
> Faraday: Pre-med. Hoping he can get into one of those rare directly-into-med-school-from-high-school programs to dodge the draft.  
> Glory: Jock. Delinquent.  
> Harkness: Mustering out to the Army in the spring.  
> John Hancock: Class president. Chem-head. Has blackmail on the principal. Actually gets great grades. Infuriates his teachers.  
> Kle0: Sells guns and lasers to the other students. Gets away with it because dystopian 'Murica.  
> Longfellow: Would rather be fishing and hunting. Has a fake ID.  
> Nate: Mustering out to the Army in the spring.  
> Nick Valentine: Smartest kid in the class. Wants to be a cop, despite this.  
> PAM: Math nerd.  
> Piper Wright: Runs the school newspaper.  
> Porter Gage: In a gang.  
> Preston Garvey: Mustering out to the Army in the spring. Somehow optimistic about this.  
> Robert MacCready: Probably a teenage dad. None too thrilled about mustering out to the Army in the spring.  
> Stanley Carrington: Pre-med. Hoping he can get into one of those rare directly-into-med-school-from-high-school programs to dodge the draft.  
> Strong: Pivotal member of the wrestling and football teams. Is a super mutant. Everyone is too afraid to comment on this.  
> Thinker Tom: Nerd-of-all-trades. Conspiracy theorist. Chem-head.  
> X6-88: Hall monitor. Sadistic jock. The art teacher has a restraining order on him.


	17. Reading in a pillow fort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon. AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon.
> 
> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)  
> [Snow day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72408081)

Pillows were rare and hard to come by in the Commonwealth. Fabric and fiber only lasted so long. To the west and to the south, new textile production was slowly starting up again, but trade routes were ever uncertain. So common pillows were made from recycled burlap sacks or from hunted skins, stuffed with radchicken feathers.

Harkness looked over the shabby little “fort” that Deacon had constructed of pillows, shook his head, and said, “I’d ask how you found all these pillows, but I’m not sure that I want to give you the satisfaction of answering me.”

“Dude. You’re ruining this. Why are you ruining this for us?” said Deacon, looking up from his book. Harkness suspected the ‘us’ was deliberate.

“Ugh. Fine. Where’d you find all these pillows?” asked Harkness, indulging his boyfriend. He paced around the pillow port.

“Freshly harvested off the pillow tree. I peeled them myself,” Deacon reported.

That was, in sentiment, if not content, about what Harkness had expected Deacon to say. He crossed his arms and observed, “This is a really shoddy fort. Not at all defensibly fortified.”

“Well maybe I need a gangplank where some asshole shouts at people, ‘Hold it right there. State your business in Rivet City,’” Deacon sniffed.

Harkness glowered. “You’d need a lot more than one guard staffing this little dump to secure it.” He stepped back and then took a big step over one of the pillow walls and laid down beside Deacon in the fort. “Oh, look, got you.”

“Shoot, the dashing top Railroad spy cornered at last!?” said Deacon, affecting mock-shock.

“What are you reading, anyway?” asked Harkness, looking at Deacon’s book.

Deacon snapped the book shut and rolled to his back so that he could cradle the book to his chest. “Nuh-uh. I’m not giving Intel to the enemy.”

Harkness squinted at the spine of the book between Deacon’s fingers. “Cities of the Plain?”

“Hah, got you. It’s actually Sodom and Gomorrah,” Deacon said smugly. “Gomorrah’s a casino back in New Vegas. Nice ambiance. I’ll take you there sometime.”

“Oh, ‘training material’?” said Harkness, with the knowing innuendo of a former soldier.

Deacon snorted. “No, this is classy, which makes it _erotica_. I mean, not really. I think this counts as Modernist?” He flipped his book back open and thumb absently through the pages, and then he read aloud, faking a French accent, _“For from what I heard at first in Jupien’s shop, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if one set had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was strangling another within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime. I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure._ ”

“You’re reading a book about some guy eavesdropping? Can’t you just go do that in real life?” said Harkness.

“No, no, it’s not about ‘some guy eavesdropping’, that’s just incidental. It’s really about some guy remembering his life. Memory is a funny thing, how something as simple as a cookie - or if you want to get fancy about it, a madelaine, can take you back to another part of your life, and you got no say in it at all,” said Deacon.

That hit Harkness harder than he thought Deacon had meant it to. His memories weren’t his own, and they could be altered oh so easily. He stiffened and mumbled, “Or some words.”

Deacon rolled back over and then slipped his arm around Harkness’s waist, giving him a squeeze. “Aw, babe. No one’s going to meddle with your memories anymore.”

“You can’t promise me that,” Harkness said quietly. It was unlikely that anyone from the SRB would recognize Harkness, given the fine plastic surgery that Pinkerton had done on him. Deacon certainly wasn’t going to tattle on Harkness, but Deacon wasn’t the only other person who knew. Some days, Harkness felt like he lived under a sword suspended against a silken string, and one day, the humidity would change, and the sword would slice through the silk, and the blade would flash and fall.

“No, but I’m a pretty little liar,” said Deacon, ruffling Harkness’s hair. “I’d tell you that I’d keep you safe if I could, but…”

The main things that Deacon typically asked of Harkness tended to make him significantly less safe. A Heavy’s job was inherently unsafe.

The silence between them hung awkward and heavy.

“So, is the book good?” Harkness asked.

“Are you into French Modernist literature where the narrator is a thinly veiled closeted homosexual?” asked Deacon.

“Uh. That’s be a ‘no’,” admitted Harkness.

“It’s my favourite book,” Deacon said enigmatically. “Anyway, I’m going to distribute these pillows as care packages for the Railroad when I’m done with them. You know, hide Cram and nail files and guns inside. Want me to read to you for a bit before then?”

“Sure,” said Harkness. It probably wasn’t even Deacon’s favourite book, and Deacon might just make things up instead of reading the actual book.

Deacon flipped some pages and read, “- _they fall in love with precisely that type of man who has nothing feminine about him, who is not an invert and consequently cannot love them in return; with the result that their desire would be forever insatiable_ -”

“Sounds miserable,” said Harkness, thinking about his memories of Anchorage, Alaska, and how he’d felt about his old best friend, Nate.

Deacon gave him another squeeze. “Yeah! At least we’re not _those_ bastards, huh?”

“Is that really your favourite book?” Harkness asked.

“It’s a close second behind Grognak,” said Deacon, smiling crookedly.

Harkness settled down, and he let Deacon read. The more he heard, the more Harkness thought that French Modernism was not his thing, but Deacon seemed to enjoy reading to him, even if this was maybe some weird performative ironic thing to Deacon. Harkness never really could tell. Ironic or not, if letting Deacon read to him made Deacon happy, it wasn’t a bad way to pass an afternoon.

Even if that fort seriously was indefensibly constructed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cities of the Plain (aka Sodome et Gomorrhe) by Marcel Proust is really just Like That, and if Deacon actually does read Proust like he claims, well... Proust was a closeted gay man who often wrote on the theory of involuntary memory, and that's rather interesting in conjunction with the Railroad, trauma, synths, and mindwipes.


	18. Breakfast in bed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deacon makes the Sole Survivor (Nate Charles) breakfast in bed.
> 
> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Incidentally, remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit, in fact. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).
> 
> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)  
> [Snow day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72408081)  
> ["Reading in a pillow fort"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72480117)  
> 

Nate never slept well, and he was used to awaking fitfully and finding his bedmates gone. He took a moment, holding his head. Mercer Safehouse. He was in Mercer Safehouse. He’d been beat tired after a run that had turned violent, and he’d stopped at Mercer for the night. Deacon and Harkness had been with him, and now, they were not. Nate listened; was there anyone in the diner below? It sounded like there might be. Before he could fully get out of bed, he heard light footsteps on the stairs, and he shortly saw Deacon on his way up, carefully balancing two platefuls of what looked vaguely like pancakes. Deacon sat on the edge of the bed, claiming one set of pancakes for himself and plopping the other plate on Nate’s lap. In an ironically saccharine voice, Deacon announced, “Honey, breakfast’s ready.”

Nora had never acted like that, but Deacon had gotten some weird ideas from reading pre-War media in a vacuum with no context. Nate smiled and picked up his knife and fork. He leaned over to give Deacon a peck on the cheek. “Thanks. Do you know where Harkness went?”

“Ran off to join the circus,” Deacon replied, inscrutable.

The ‘pancakes’, if that’s what they were, were made of a gritty sort of coarse-ground grain. Deacon had fried them to a light golden colour, but the actual grain seemed to be mauve, maybe lavender. The pancakes were piping hot, with brahmin butter and a drizzle of syrup. Nate took his first bite thoughtfully. “Uh huh. Okay. Hmm. This is… maple syrup?”

“Probably? Could be some sycamore, birch, or hickory in there, but it’s almost certainly  _ mostly _ maple syrup,” Deacon replied evasively.

“It’s... more complex in flavour than I’m used to? I think we mostly just had ‘breakfast syrup’, which… I think Nora reminded me that the companies legally couldn’t call it maple syrup, because it contained no maple? I think it was mostly just high fructose corn syrup. Hmm,” said Nate, taking another bite. He wasn’t used to fresh, hot pancakes, between the Army and what had been his home life. At home, they’d eaten a whole lot of Sugar Bombs. Nora was too busy getting back to her career to cook breakfast, and Nate had been too… Well, post-traumatic stress disorder was a hell of a thing. Codsworth could have cooked breakfast, but ‘could’ and ‘should’ were not the same thing.

“Interesting. Anyway, they’re johnnycakes, a staple of greater New England cuisine! Now, Rhode Island will claim they invented them, but Rhode Island’s not here now, is it?” mused Deacon.

Nate winced. “Did Rhode Island get nuked that badly?”

Deacon put his hands up in placation. “Dude, I just meant that Rhode Island is not personally involved in this conversation, Anyway, maize meal,” which explained the purplish tinge; most corn these days seemed on the purple-blue spectrum, “a little tree syrup, salt, purified water, brahmin milk, and butter, and bam, a filling breakfast for a Heavy.”

Nate shovelled another forkful into his mouth and sat up a little straighter in bed. “You have another op for me.”

“Ye-ess, that might be it,” Deacon admitted, handing Nate a scrap of paper.

Nate looked it over, narrowing his eyes. “Harkness went on an op last night, didn’t he? You could have woken me. I would have helped.”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem, that you totally would, because then you’d be stupid-tired come morning. So I let you sleep. You’re welcome,” said Deacon, crossing his arms.

Nate sighed. “Okay, you’re not wrong… and these ‘johnnycakes’ were a pretty nice treat to wake up to. Thanks again.”

“Well bud, I hope you like maize meal, because we got maize meal,” said Deacon.

“I’m… not all that used to corn meal. My mom didn’t really cook with it, and Nora… didn’t really cook,” admitted Nate. He’d seen plenty of maize fields in the Commonwealth and some razorgrain, but he hadn’t seen many other grains being grown. He missed rice something fierce. Nate looked over at Deacon’s sunglasses. “But I was a soldier. I’m not picky about food. I’ll get used to it for you - of course, I’m sure you’ll make that easy. All your cooking’s good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Johnnycakes are a greater New England regional staple.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnycake#United_States) [A simple johnnycake recipe](https://www.tablespoon.com/recipes/johnny-cakes/a6553512-96c3-4ed6-942b-094dd5f71082). [Massachusetts is known for producing maple syrup.](https://www.massmaple.org/buy-maple-syrup/directory/)


	19. Beach day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the fall of the Institute, Glory and PAM go out to seek a second opinion for G5-19 from the mysterious synth colony known as Acadia. This is a specific Glory Lives AU that I have, although Glory Also Lives if one goes for the Minuteman ending and does not destroy the Railroad.
> 
> Same universe as:  
> [ _Robots*_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72014598)  
> [ _Playing an instrument or singing_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72197859)

The Institute had fallen over a year ago now. The Railroad still had years worth of work to do, but even now, it was starting to slow down. There was one synth that the Railroad could neither move out of the Commonwealth nor place in a synth-friendly community within the Commonwealth: G5-19. G5-19 was clinically brain dead after too many memory wipes. Glory, who’d been her friend, was now her caretaker. G5-19 breathed on her own; she didn’t need a ventilator, but that was it. She was fed by a gastric tube in her stomach.

Amari said that G5-19’s neural architecture was in tatters, and that was why she couldn’t just print another synth mind on G5-19. Then Nate had found a Ms. Nanny, called Curie, who wanted a more human body. Amari thought that she could probably ‘port over the Ms. Nanny’s mind, that Curie’s neural architecture could fill in the holes in poor G5-19, but Glory couldn’t help but feel that G5-19 had fought (and died) for a better fate than to be the walking repository for a tin can.

Nate had suggested that Glory could go to Acadia for a second opinion. Acadia was a free synth refuge in the North, and some of the synths there said they’d gotten quite good at memory restorations. Maybe one of them could help G5-19, if Glory wanted a second opinion. Nate had commented that he was dying to know what Glory thought of ‘Dima’, the leader of the Acadian synths, and would have loved to see her reaction in person, but the Railroad couldn’t afford to be down two Heavies for the time it would take.

Surprisingly, PAM offered to go with Glory. PAM almost never left headquarters. The modified Assaultron was coy on why she wanted to go, but Glory wasn’t going to pass up having someone watching her back on a long trip.

The walk wasn’t bad for a synth. Humans were, at base, persistence hunters. They walked their prey to death. Synths were built on that model but didn’t get tired as easily as humans did. The boat trip was maybe the worst part. Mr. Nakano didn’t question why a woman with a heavy minigun and a modified Assaultron wanted to go to Far Harbor. He just took their caps and took them there. Glory had never been on a boat before, though. She didn’t have ‘sea legs’ or whatever that was. Synths didn’t get normal-sick, but Glory sure got seasick on that choppy boat ride as they crested over peaked waves.

As Glory recovered on the dock, waiting for the world to stop swaying, PAM stood watch over her. 

“Wait. That's not one of mine,” said a harsh male voice. 

Glory could see the shadows of a man going for a rifle, and she tried to pick up her own minigun, which felt heavy in her trembling hands. The ocean could suck it.

“Jesus. Ease up, Allen. We got visitors,” argued a woman.

“Mainlanders ain't nothing but trouble,” sneered the man, Allen.

The woman commanded, “Put the damned gun down.” She seemed to be aiming that at Allen, not at Glory, which was good, because if Glory could get to her feet with her gun, she wasn’t putting it back down. “Are you lost? This is Far Harbor. We... don't get many visitors around here.”

“We don't need no freeloaders or more ‘help’, mainlander,” insisted Allen, “So you can get back in your boat and leave.”

“Only 12% chance of scenario ‘get back in boat and leave’,” PAM reported softly.

“Yeah, I’m not leaving,” Glory said mulishly. She owed G5-19.

The woman sighed, “Sorry, you've caught us during a... difficult time. But Allen's got a point, not all visitors have good intentions.” She looked from the Assaultron to Glory’s minigun, eyes narrowed. “So, what's your business here?

Shit, Glory did not have a cover story. A Heavy usually didn’t need a cover story; all a Heavy needed to do was clear the way. Deacon would have been making fun of her so hard right now if he knew she’d left home without a cover story.

“83% chance will encounter locals with machinery in need of maintenance; have services for offer,” said PAM.

PAM had a cover story? PAM had a plausible cover story? Glory could have kissed her. Maybe later.

“Tinkers! Feckin’ tinkers!” Allen swore.

“Now, now,” scolded the women, “the machine’s right. There’s plenty of folks in these parts who could use a mechanic’s help. Well, then, I’m Captain Avery, and you two would be?”

“I was, am, and will most likely be P.A.M.: Predictive Analytic Machine,” supplied PAM.

That was more honest that Glory would have liked - she could already hear Deacon’s bitching - and she said simply, “Chelsea Tavares.” 

“Well, Ms. Tavares, you might want to go talk to the Mariner. She does most of the maintenance here,” said Avery.

Something about the way that Avery just assumed that ‘Ms. Tavares’ was in charge, despite PAM being the one who’d spoken up about having useful services for barter. Avery probably assumed that Glory was PAM’s owner, and that felt wrong, deep in Glory’s bones.

They cased the joint. It was the typical shitty sort of low-tech human village that humans scraped together, only with an ungodly amount of water next to it. Directions to Acadia weren’t hard to get, but everyone seemed to feel the need to warn Glory that the people there were queer and that everything in the forest would kill her.  _ Please _ . Didn’t they see Glory’s haircut? She could handle queer, and if they wouldn’t respect Glory’s mingun (they should have, dammit), they ought to at least respect the Assaultron by her side.

The trip through the forest was full of no less than twelve incidents where wildlife insisted on running into a hail of Glory’s bullets and being turned into a fine red paste. Then there was one Child of Atom missionary. Kooky nutjobs, the lot of them.

Acadia itself was poorly defended with a shoddily constructed barricade. PAM, however, considered the structure and said, “96% chance the inhabitants already know we’re here.”

“Yeah, I expect synths to at least be able to figure out security cameras,” Glory snapped. She’d expected better of her own kind, living free, on their own, somehow. Obviously, they weren’t going to be able to rebuild the Institute, with its metal and stark white, and she wouldn’t want them to, but she felt like they could have done something more impressive than this.

They entered. Whatever Glory had been expecting inside the old observatory, she hadn’t been expecting something silhouetted like a radstag rising from the fog, only to step into the light to reveal a battered old Gen 2 crowned with vacuum tubes. Glory thought that Gen 2s were people, abelit kind of stupid people, so she avoided killing them when she could. After the fall of the Institute, there weren’t many Gen 2s left.

This Gen 2 was immediately and clearly different. Aside from the vacuum tubes and the other widgets, his face was subtly strange compared to a standard Gen 2, and when he spoke, it was in a unique voice, “Hello there. I apologise if I must brief right now. We’ve been planning an… excursion for some time now. You do not appear to be acutely dying or otherwise in need of urgent help.” His gaze flickered briefly from Glory to PAM.

Glory found herself a bit speechless.

The Gen 2 added, “But I must apologise. I haven’t even introduced myself. I am DiMA, and this is Acadia. You were looking for Acadia, weren’t you?” 

“I…. yeah,” Glory admitted, rubbing the back of her head. There was a Gen 2, talking eloquently as any Gen 3. “Uh. I don’t urgently need help, I know that’s obvious, but… uh.” Spilling the beans to some otherworldly Gen 2 without first vetting him was not good OpSec. “...what’s this excursion?”

“Cog has made the case that the weather is pleasant, unusually so, and thusly we should have a ‘beach day’,” supplied DiMA, who looked over his shoulder.

From behind the central set of computer banks, a dark-haired man in high-waisted swim trunks peered at Glory and PAM. “Er… who are they, DiMA?”

“Chelsea Tavares,” Glory said, even as PAM went into, “I was, am, and will most likely be P.A.M.: Predictive Analytic Machine.”

Shit, Glory needed to come up with a cover identity for PAM. Deacon was going to roast them when they got back.

DiMA’s head tilted to the side. “...hrm, interesting. 32 or 64 bit predictive matrix?”

“128,” PAM supplied.

Was it just Glory’s imagination, or did some of the little lights in DiMA’s assorted tubes and gewgaws glow a bit brighter? He looked over at the other man, and then back at PAM and suggested, “Why don’t you and your lady companion come with us to the beach?”

That was how Glory ended up at the beach with PAM and what appeared to be half of Acadia. DiMA, the weird Gen 2, was apparently one of the three leaders of Acadia, and he appeared to have a very specific interest in predictive models, as did his co-leader and companion, Faraday, the dark-haired man in high-waisted swim trunks. The two of them more or less cornered PAM, sitting well on the sandy part of the beach, away from the waves. Faraday did frown as DiMA sat down on the sand, and he muttered, “I’m going to be cleaning sand out of you for weeks, DiMA.”

“Yes,” DiMA said dryly, “it’s like I planned it that way.”

Faraday huffed, “You do know that I have other things that I could be doing, don’t you, dear?”

‘Dear’. Glory considered what she’d witnessed of the dynamic between DiMA and Faraday.

“I am aware, but you were looking for an excuse to give me another overhaul, and never let it be said that I am not accommodating of your desires,” replied DiMA.

Okay, right, those two were definitely a thing. Faraday was a… Gen 3? And a fairly attractive one at that. And that man was definitely fucking head over heels for a busted up old Gen 2. 

No wonder Nate had wanted to see what happened when Glory met DiMA. This was… wow. Somewhat even more inexplicable than that first time Desdemona met PAM.

Glory was almost 90%, to make up her own bullshit statistic, certain that the severe-looking woman in the black empire waist swimsuit was a Courser. An AWOL one, to be sure, but she’d been watching both Glory and PAM like a hawk while also playing a brutal game of beach volleyball against two opponents who were falling over each other trying to keep up with her sand-driving spikes. Humans couldn’t multi-task like that.

While DiMA, PAM, and Faraday wittered on about some predictive model garbage that about bored Glory to tears, a black man said, “That’s Chase you’re staring at. She’s one of the co-leaders of Acadia. Keeps us safe. Keeps  _ synths _ safe. What’s your business here, Chelsea?”

It was indescribably weird, to Glory, for synths to be that open about what they were to strangers. She was used to passing herself off as a human. What would it be like, to be open about what she was? Glory said tentatively, “I look after a synth who is injured. I thought maybe someone here might be able to… give me some advice on how to help her.”

“You’re not here with her,” the man observed.

“No, she’s… she’s…” Glory choked up a bit. “...the doc says she’s brain dead. Too many memory wipes. She’s strong. She breathes. But me and my friends, we have to tube feed her and look after her.”

The man’s eyes flashed with alarm and grief. “Oh. That sounds pretty bad. Shoot, yeah… you’d actually want to talk to Faraday and DiMA about that. They have the most experience with that kind of thing.”

“Thanks,” Glory said wanly. How how the fuck did she get Faraday and DiMA to stop talking to PAM about meteorology? Seriously, who gave a shit about some fog?

Another pair of… synths? came running by, one a scruffy man, the other a discontent-looking woman, and the man called, “Later on today, you wanna see if Faraday's up for switching our brains? I could be you, you could be me... It'd be fun.”

The woman snapped, “Oh, fuck off Cog. You know I'm not doin' that.”

That was what Glory’s people got up to for fun, left to their own devices? No wonder they needed a beach day.

Another woman was wandering the beach haphazardly, picking up bits of washed-ashore ocean plants and tucking them away in a basket. Someone else was working on building a little house of wet sand.

Then the scruffy looking man came back and addressed Glory, “Hey, new chick. Since Chase just about pounded me and Jule into the sand, you and your buddy want to go play her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that,” said Glory, breaking into a slow, predatory grin, as she tapped PAM on the shoulder. “Hey PAM, you and me versus Chase? Beach volleyball?”

PAM took a moment, her fans whirring. “Odds of victory only 44%.”

“Whatever, PAM, I’ve - ”  _ taken runs with worse odds _ , but she’d also almost died, “ - I know we can do it, anyway. Remember Dayton?”

“Unsure if allusion relevant,” PAM replied, standing up and shaking some sand off herself.

“Oh, but you will come back and talk with us more, won’t you? I still think the second order regressions need to take into account the hypothetical scenario where the Children  _ are _ causing the Fog,” said Faraday, looking as if he was seriously concerned that PAM was going to go play volleyball and never return.

“88% chance of return pending completion of game: volleyball,” PAM replied, following Glory to their side of the net, which was an old fishing net.

The ball was actually a basketball. It didn’t bounce well on sand. 

“Your serve, newcomer,” said Chase.

Oh yes, Glory was going to have fun making a Courser eat sand. 44% chance of victory, Glory’s ass.

After a hard-fought game where even Glory broke a sweat, which came down to PAM calculating how to deliver some weird kind of spike with both backspin and frontspin at the same time - shouldn’t they have cancelled out? Whatever, it worked, Glory was surprised to realize that DiMA was golf-clapping ever so politely.

Gold-clapping. Who the hell did that, aside from Deacon? What was  _ with _ DiMA? Well, okay, it was probably just that both of his hands were jacked up, and he probably didn’t want to break them further, but still.

“Impressive. You two gave Chase a challenge,” DiMA observed, “and then some. Tell me, Ms. Chelsea Tavares, are you a synth?”

Glory was acutely aware that Chase was pushing herself up off the sand from where she’d dove and failed to get that last spike and that Chase was watching Glory, her gaze like a laser beam. The thing to do was lie. These synths didn’t need to know she was one of them. She was just here to get help for G5-19, not to…

...not to be a part of her own damn community.

Glory closed her eyes. “Yeah. What about it?”

Suddenly, it felt like a weight across her shoulders, one that Glory hadn’t even known was there, was lifted. She felt light, like she’d done some of Tinker Tom’s chems, airy, oddly free. 

“Many synths come to Acadia. They all have their own reasons. Why have you come here, Chelsea?” DiMA asked lightly. “Surely not our… entertainment options?”

“I’m pushing for bowling next week,” said the one called Cog.

“The bowling alley is full of ghouls,” said the one called Dejen, unsmiling.

“Like I was telling, uh… Dejen? I’m the caretaker of an injured synth,” Glory admitted reluctantly, “Well. More than injured. She’s… kinda braindead. Too many mindwipes. Thought maybe someone here could help.”

DiMA folded his hands together in front of himself and looked back at Faraday. “Potentially.”

“Like, the doc says her neural architecture is wrecked or whatever? So she can’t just upload a new mind on her like she does for… well, nevermind. But that she could, uh… probably upload a Ms. Nanny. That it’d patch the holes or whatever. It’s bullshit. G5-19 at least deserves a second opinion,” Glory said, jutting her chin out.

“Tell me… what was G5-19 like?” DiMA said softly.

“Listen, G5-19 went through a lot, but she was good. Solid. Tough. Tough enough the SRB had to strip her mind. More than once. But… G5 was scared. Like most synths, she was terrified the Institute would find her and send her back. When I saw G5... She didn't even recognize me. But I owed her from my time in the Institute. I tried to convince her she could live free, as herself. But she didn't listen,” Glory recounted, miserable.

“You are implying it was a Railroad mindwipe that was the proverbial straw that broke the brahmin’s back?” inquired DiMA, ever so gently.

“Does it matter?” Glory snapped.

“Somewhat. The… style is somewhat different than an Institute mindwipe, in our experience.” DiMA paused, as if thinking. “Though I will confess we’ve seen two distinctly different styles of mindwipes from synths run by the Railroad, although one style is older, and we have not seen it for some time. I’m afraid that I would not be able to give you a more specific reply than ‘possibly’ without actually seeing G5-19 myself. Faraday, dearest?”

“Er… I’d agree with that. Is there any chance you could move G5-19 here, so we could examine her?” said Faraday.

Glory winced. “Probably not. I don’t know how I’d go about moving her? I think Mr. Nakano would have some awkward questions for me, and between all the perils along the trip, the raiders, the animals… I can’t risk her.”

“Then I suppose that you or I ought to pay a house call,” said DiMA, looking at Faraday.

Faraday immediately rushed over to DiMA and carefully put his hands on DiMA’s shoulders, and he said plaintively, “DiMA! You can’t leave Acadia. Who would look after you? And  _ I _ can’t leave Acadia, either - because who would look after you?”

“Faraday, I am hardly as infirm as you think me, and… you were going to give me that major overhaul, after all,” said DiMA, somehow managing to look coquettish at Faraday.

“I, ah… does G5-19 have a week?” Faraday asked weakly.

“Probably? She’s stable,” said Glory.

Faraday sighed heavily. “Then DiMA and I will sort something out.” he paused, looking pensive. “It’ll probably be DiMA who goes with you. He’s… better with minds than I am.” He shot a guilty look over at a wrecked boat on the beach, of all things. “But you  _ have _ to look after him. And protect him. And bring him back to me. And Acadia.”

“Sure. I got experience at protecting synths,” said Glory. Not Gen 2s, but she wasn’t going to mention that. Maybe she could convince DiMA to wear some clothes? He’d be less-attention getting if he wore clothes. Ugh, putting DiMA in clothes was probably what Deacon would do, that disguise nerd.

“Excellent,” said DiMA, as if everything was settled, “Well then… I believe that Miranda and Aster wanted to have a bonfire and a night-time beach barbeque?”

As it turned out, the Acadian synths were actually excellent radchicken farmers. Glory didn’t think she’d ever had radchicken that tasted that good. She asked Miranda, “What’s in the barbeque sauce?”

Miranda replied, conspiratorially, “Fire belly.”

Glory broke into a smile. “Oh, that’d do it!”

The bonfire crackled into the night. Maybe Glory didn’t have an answer for G5-19 just yet, but she’d get that second opinion, and for now, she was among her own kind. She didn’t have to lie about what she was. As she sat on the sand, watching the fire, she reached over to take PAM’s hand. 

PAM admitted, “I calculated 57% chance that location ‘Acadia’ would contain mathematically oriented individuals and that presenting myself would offer enough of an interest item to allow you to make inquiries.”

_ That _ was why PAM had come along? As an offering to the math nerds so Glory could get in a word edgewise? “Oh, PAM, you did that for me and G5-19?”

Now Glory did give PAM a kiss. It was surreal how much as a… non-event it was. Even in the Railroad, Glory felt self-conscious about what she had with PAM. Sure, she’d deck people if they made rude comments, but the problem was that there were rude comments in the first place.

Literally no one in Acadia thought a Gen 3 kissing an Assaultron was worthy of comment.

That was wonderful.


	20. Camping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick Valentine/Sam Vimes. In which they go on a camping trip with the kids and the Ankh-Morpork Scouting and Urban Survival Federation. Belongs somewhere in the ["Valentine & Vimes" Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076).

“We could be attacked by gorillas,” said Vimes gloomily.

Valentine was working on pitching their tent in the little camping area hubwards of Ankh-Morpork proper where the Ankh-Morpork Scouting and Urban Survival Federation was having a weekend camping trip. They’d asked as many parents as possible to come along to supervise. Sybil, of course, had wanted to monitor her dragons but had arranged matters just so, such that both Valentine and Vimes were free to watch their boys 2 .

Otherwise, as many parents as possible had elected to be Not Available, possibly hoping that their children would become lost in the woods and eat some witch’s house. It was Traditional.

Piper was genuinely too busy with work to watch Nat, who was trying to earn her Wildlife Iconography badge - the Scouts didn’t accept Nat’s dozens of iconographs of pigeons as ‘wildlife’, even when she brought in iconographs of pigeons attempting to hold up other pigeons for their banged grains with little pigeon shivs and had argued that was certainly  _ wild _ behaviour. Disorderly, at least.

But Lars Skulldrinker’s three little dwarfs were just there without their father or their father and were attempting to engineer a proper mine into the loam in the span of a weekend.

Valentine grunted, “Sam, they don’t get gorillas out here.”

Deacon had found the time to supervise Bold Breakneck (his child Mango’s current alias), which Deacon claimed was mainly because someone had filed a court injunction the last time Deacon left Bold unsupervised. Vimes doubted that; not that someone would file a court injunction, but that the plaintiff would be able to determine the correct Deacon alias to file it under to make it stick. Deacon observed, “Actually, there have been a whole lot of reports of unseasonably high gorilla violence in the area.”

“We had gorillas in the Institute,” Shaun added helpfully. He was working on constructing a fire pit, although Vimes didn’t really think fire pits were supposed to be as complicated as Shaun was making it out to be. The boy had better not be constructing a nuclear reactor again. Just because his idol Leonard da Quirm did it once didn’t make it a good idea.

In fact, Leonard da Quirm doing anything generally classified it as a bad idea.

“Seriously?” asked Nat, perking up.

“Uh-huh. The gorillas had to have synth caretakers, because they kept killing humans,” said Shaun, dropping some glowing green rocks into the centre of the firepit.

“And they didn’t kill the synths?” asked Nat, jotting down some notes.

“No, the gorillas killed the synths, too; the humans just didn’t care,” Shaun explained, and then he winced, after he thought about what he’d said.

“If Deacon’s saying there’s gorillas here, you know I’m right that there aren’t,” insisted Valentine.

“Oh come on, Bold has found gorilla tracks already! He’s going to earn his merit budget for tracking. I’m so proud,” said Deacon, pointing over at where his genderfluid child was scrabbling in the dirt.

Valentine and Vimes took a break from erecting the tent to examine the ‘tracks’ that Bold had found. Truthfully, neither Valentine nor Vimes had any idea what gorilla tracks were supposed to look like. Vimes scratched his head and said, “So… we make plaster casts and then track down a gorilla expert?”

“This has to be fake,” Valentine swore, crossing his arms. “This ain’t great ape country.”

“I don’t know,” said Vimes dubiously, “We get orangutans in the city.”

“He’s the Librarian, and that’s different!” Valentine snapped, optics flashing brighter.

“Humans are great apes,” said Nat helpfully.

“I don’t see what’s so great about us,” Vimes muttered.

“What about the Patrician’s menagerie?” asked young Sam. “Uncle Havelock’s got some excellent apes there. Oh, and the College of Heralds… well, those apes are pretty shabby, honestly.”

“Look, ladies and gents,” said Bold, with the slightest veneer of sarcasm, “you can waste air all you like, but I’m following these tracks and getting those sweet, sweet merit badges.”

The woods around the campsite were dark, but Bold was experienced at carrying a torch at night. He’d been a link boy, a sort of paid walk-you-home-in-the-dark service. The little group ended up following him, mainly because Vimes decided he would rather sneak up on a gorilla than be snuck on by a gorilla.

“I think a bug just walked over my foot,” complained Shaun.

“That bug ought to be grateful it wasn’t the other way around,” said Vimes.

The tracks led to an old shack in the woods that showed signs of recent use, wherein there was a gorilla costume hung up on a hook on the wall. Valentine said, “Huh,” examining it, and he eyed Deacon warily.

Deacon put his hands up, “Not me.  _ I _ would make sure the grain of the fur lies in a natural direction. That thing is amateur hour. Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.”

They decided to stake out the shack to see if anyone came by. This was mainly because when Valentine and Vimes didn’t know what to do, they’d stake  _ something _ out, and Deacon was a nosy bastard. Also, the children would all get their merit badge in Stakeouts.

It was difficult to see in the dark, but as the thick forest, with the smoggy, railroad-smoke polluted sky above it, approached pitch blackness, the Summoning Dark saw for Vimes. A mustachioed man furtively snuck into the shack, and then he put on the gorilla costume, and he started to tromp back to the campsite.

He attempted to rampage and roar, but he ended up falling into a deep ditch that had been engineered by the children of Lars Skulldrinker, who apparently felt like they needed to prepare for the Second Borogravian-Zlobenian War. Valentine reached down into the ditch and pulled off the gorilla masking, crowing, “See? It’s just some guy in a costume!”

Nat flipped through her notebook back to some newspaper clippings, “But uhm, Mr. Deacon’s right, there have been gorilla sightings out here?”

“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for you meddling...” the man protested, and then he looked around.

He was surrounded by a troupe of the Ankh-Morpork Scouting and Urban Survival Federation, which meant a lot of child humans, dwarfs, and trolls, one child vampire, one centaur foal, and a smattering of parents, one of said parents being Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

“Oh bloody hells,” the man said, and he fell silent.

It took some unravelling, but eventually, they got to the bottom of it. The man was an out of work member of the Actors’ Guild, who’d been hired by the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway to scare the locals away so that another rail line could be put in.

As Valentine finally finished putting up their tent, Vimes reflected brightly, “We ought to go camping more often, dear. I had no idea there were so many unsolved crimes in the great outdoors.”

“This isn’t what camping’s supposed to be like,” said Valentine, but only half-heartedly. The man had enjoyed collaring the would-be gorilla actor. Vimes knew it.

“This is exactly what camping’s like,” lied Deacon.

2 Translation: Sybil had talked to Carrot and Vetinari behind their backs.


	21. First “I Love You”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Canon divergent. Assumes that,  
> instead of hanging around Vault 13 and founding a tribe, the Vault  
> Dweller stayed with the Brotherhood and [was sent to the east to go tracking escapees from the Master's army](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel_\(Midwest\)#Background).  
> Same universe as:  
>  _["Adopting an animal"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> ["Date night"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71960271)  
> ["Star gazing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72084183)  
> ["Huddling for warmth"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481372)  
> ["Hiding from a storm"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71899419)  
> ["Fishing"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)_

It was some time after they had finished yet another battle with radscorpions and settled in to camp for the night. They had cooked and eaten and banked the coals of the campfire so that the glow won’t attract attention. Tycho had tucked into his tent with Albert, dead tired and wondering if perhaps they’d make it to Necropolis tomorrow.

That was when Albert murmured, his breath warm against the nape of Tycho’s neck, “I love you.”

Tycho thought about that. He’d followed Albert into some of the choicest hellholes on Earth, and he’d do it again. He’d fought by Albert’s side. He’d shared water with the man. Did it even need saying? What he asked was, “Have you ever been in love before?”

Did Albert even know what love felt like? He talked, and he listened, and he made people feel special, and he damn well weaponized human interaction. He  _ used _ people. The man could talk raiders into giving up their slaves - could and had.

Albert’s hand on Tycho/s hip tightened slightly, and he gave a short, bitter, laugh. “Yes. That’s part of why I was ‘volunteered’ to leave Vault 13.”

Albert had once mentioned being serious about someone back in Vault 13 in conjunction with his exile. Tycho inquired, “Had someone back home?”

“Ed,” Albert said softly, “He was a part of my movement to leave the Vault. The water chip had been failing for a long time. The Overseer sent Ed out to find a new water chip, oh, maybe a year before he sent me? I found Ed’s body in the caves just outside the Vault. He was gnawed to death by rats, but I… could still recognize him. My Ed. He didn’t even make it out to see the sun.”

Tycho reached back to stroke Albert’s face and felt a trickle of water there.

“I… I think that the Overseer decided that Ed and I weren’t ‘breeders’, so we’d never  _ contribute _ ,” Albert infused the word with all the bitterness of rad scorpion venom, “to the Vault. So we were expendable. We weren’t the only... ‘queer’ people volunteered to leave the Vault. There was Talius, too, and… well, let’s just say that I noticed a pattern.” He shifted restlessly.

Tycho had been through areas that weren’t too friendly to their sorts of people. Some folks got a strange bug in their brains and got to thinking that each and every person had some duty to repopulate the Earth. Some folks just thought their kind was  _ unnatural _ . Well, Tycho had seen ducks do unspeakable things to each other in the wild. Nature didn’t have any shame.

“So, yes. I’ve been in love, and I love you now,” Albert finished.

Albert was easy with words, with a look. He sparkled like a mirage. But wouldn’t it be lovely, to be loved and to love in return? Wouldn’t it be lovely to believe? 

“I love you, too,” said Tycho, though he’d already said it before with his actions.

“My desert ranger,” Albert murmured, giving Tycho a squeeze.

“My exiled Vault Dweller,” said Tycho.

“I’m so lucky I walked into that dive bar,” said Albert.

A man who was more smug would have said ‘you sure were’, but Tycho had never needed to brag. “So, we’ll be coming up on Necropolis soon…”

“Just let me dream beside you tonight,” said Albert.

The city of the dead could wait.


	22. Slow dancing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nate Charles, Harkness, and a pretty redhead go for a night at the Third Rail. Contains genderfluid Deacon.
> 
> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)  
> [Snow day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72408081)  
> [Reading in a pillow fort](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72480117)  
> [Breakfast in bed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72568134)  
> 

It was one of Magnolia’s days off at the Third Rail and a slow night in general, which made it a perfect night for the Nate, Harkness, and a pretty redhead in a slinky sequin dress to grab the back room and use Nate’s Pip-Boy as a jukebox. 

“Are you a girl tonight, or is this drag?” asked Harkness. The three of them were seated together on either side of Nate.

“Yes, I am a girl tonight,  _ or _ this is drag,” Deacon said unhelpfully, adjusting a dainty pair of cat’s eyes sunglasses with a tortoiseshell pattern on the rim. “Does it make a difference to you?”

Harkness shrugged. “I’m still going to treat you the same, either way.”

“See, Nate treats me like a lady,” said Deacon, gently laying a hand on Nate’s forearm.

“You don’t find that patronising?” Harkness asked dubiously.

“I’m not trying to be patronising,” said Nate.

“It’s not patronising!” Deacon assured, patting Nate’s arm and leaning in for a kiss on the cheek. “It’s super-sweet.”

“Do you want me to treat you like a lady?” Harkness asked, feeling that he was being set up in some fashion.

“Do you treat women like ladies?” Deacon asked.

“Well, if you’d ask Danvers, Glory, or Desdemona, I’m pretty sure they’d give you an emphatic ‘no’,” Harkness murmured. “And boy, would Madison Li give you a ‘no’ on that front these days.”

Li was lucky to be alive. 

“Then nah, we’re good,” Deacon said, flashing a smile, “And yeah, I’m a girl right now.”

Deacon was genderfluid. Most of the time, Deacon was a guy, but sometimes she wasn’t, but Deacon also enjoyed drag. Harkness knew just how important personal identity was, so he did his best to be respectful, which meant he didn’t assume Deacon was a girl just because Deacon was in a dress. (Sometimes, Deacon was a girl in a very sharp tuxedo.)

Nate slipped an arm around Deacon’s waist, gazing fondly at her. “Our pretty girl.”

Harkness grabbed Nate’s other arm and loaded a holo-tape into it. “Found a cache of confiscated bootleg holo-tapes while I was helping Valentine with finding what he needs.” He looked to Deacon. “Give me a dance?”

“Sure thing, sugar bomb,” said Deacon, indulging Harkness as he reached for her hand to lead her up to the center of the room.

The wail of a saxophone emitted from the tinny speaker of Nate’s Pip-Boy, and Harkness pulled Deacon into a dance. Harkess wasn’t exactly a good dancer, though he had the agility and physical coordination. Deacon, though, was a very good dancer, because dancing inconspicuously was a great way to blend into a crowd and bump up against other people as they circled around, focused on their partners. Deacon was, in fact, good enough to compensate for Harkness’s general lack of dancing expertise. She was a pleasure to hold, sequined fabric an odd texture against his hand at the small of her back, his other hand over her hand - her nails painted an immaculate firetruck red.

They’d be different tomorrow, Harkness was sure. Probably back to plain, unpainted. No one ever associated the guy in the clubmaster sunglasses and the white shirt and jeans with the manicured redhead. That was the point.

By the time the song was done, Deacon’s breathing had picked up slightly, and Harkness, holding her hand, could feel her pulse had quickened. If she was blushing, he couldn’t tell, between the dim light and her carefully applied makeup, but she leaned against him a moment and murmured, “Now that was a riot.”

“Thought that would do it for you. It’s Big Jay McNeely. The Deacon’s Hop,” replied Harkness.

“Honey, leave the prevarication to the experts,” Deacon said breezily.

Nate held up his Pip-Boy, displaying the track’s title to be exactly what Harkness had said. Deacon adjusted the cat’s eye sunglasses. “Huh. My own legendary jazz track. Carrington will never live this down. There aren’t any songs called the Carrington, right? Pre-War boyfriends, if I’m wrong, don’t correct me on this.”

Nate popped out the bootleg holo-tape and popped in a different one. “May the jukebox cut in?”

“Fine by me, if the lady feels like it,” said Harkness, letting go of Deacon’s hand.

“The lady insists on it!” said Deacon.

“Well, actually, I was going to cut in and take Harkness off your hands - hah, no,” said Nate, taking Deacon’s hand and kissing it. “Maybe later tonight.”

The animated jazz of the Deacon’s Hop gave away to Frank Sinatra’s “Oh! What It Seemed To Be”. Harkness watched Nate and Deacon slow dance. Damn, but Nate really did know how to treat a lady. Then again, Nate always had.

Getting to experience first-hand that Nate also knew how to treat a guy was a newer development, one Harkness was actually enjoying seeing where it led, which was, as threatened, onto the dancefloor together, later that night to the tune of the slower crooning of Helen O'Connell’s “I'm Stepping Out With A Memory Tonight”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nate is pre-War, and while he tries to treat people of all genders fairly, he does tend to treat men and women a bit differently. He's more likely to hold a door open for a woman, etc.
> 
> Harkness has pre-War memories, but he's been out and about in the Wasteland longer than Nate has, and the Wasteland doesn't quite care about gender in the same way that Pre-War America did, and deep down, he's A3-21, to whom gender is fairly irrelevant. Harkness tend to act in a way that lead to him as treating all genders the same. His best friend was Danvers, a woman, before Rivet City was destroyed.
> 
> Deacon picks up on (and picks at) these behavioral differences.


	23. Arcade/Amusement Park - Fo4 - X4-72 & Porter Gage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [X4-72](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Institute_terminal_entries#Maintenance_Requests) was an Institute Courser until she developed blurry vision in the right-eye and was mindwiped and reassigned to the Facilities division. However, mindwipes don't always work perfectly, and she slowly remembered who and what she was and decided that she'd had quite enough of the Institute that so callously discarded her after her loyal service. When she saw a chance to get out, he took it.
> 
> When she saw Nuka-World, X4-72 took that, too.
> 
> Porter Gage then concludes that the new Overboss needs to loosen up a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for:  
> \- canon-typical violence  
> \- swearing  
> \- beginning part is not very fluffy; there is a jump-cut to avoid the beginning and go to the fluffier section, if desired

_ [Skip the beginning; jump to the fluffier part.] _

X4-72 had once been a Courser, a one-woman battalion-killer, a synth hunter, the elite tool of the Synth Reclamation Bureau. Then she’d developed some blurred vision in her right eye, and they’d wiped her and reassigned her to the Facilities division. However, mindwipes didn’t always work. Months after her wipe, her memories had started to come back to her, in drips and drabbles. Once, she’d had respect. Once, every synth had looked at her with terror in their hearts. One word from X4-72, and a synth could be hauled away to the SRB. She’d brought down so many runners. No sedition was safe from her pitiless gaze. All that loyal service to the SRB, all her own blood shed on the filthy surface in the line of fire, and it had meant nothing. X4-72 had been wiped and thrown away, consigned to a life of menial maintenance.

She didn’t let on that she remembered, and she looked for a way out. When surface-dwellers came storming the Institute, seeking to liberate the synths, X4-72 saw a golden opportunity. In the chaos and confusion, she drew on her stealth training, and she snuck back into the SRB and picked open another Courser’s locker - X9-73, she’d never liked him, anyway, too cocky. She stole his spare black armored Courser coat, the spare laser pistol, several clips of energy cells, and three synth relay grenades.

Then X4-72 stuffed all that in a duffle bag and ran to the Relay, where some foolish surface human was teleporting out any synth who wanted to leave before the whole place blue. The human didn’t bat one eye at X4-72 in her white synth uniform and teleported her out.

The surface was as disgusting as she remembered it being. The first thing X4-72 did was summon three Gen 1 synths with the relay grenades. X4-72 imperiously informed them that she was Courser X4-72 and that they would obey her.

Then she held up a trio of raiders, executing them easily, despite the blurry vision in her right eye. The looks on their faces as they were mercilessly slaughtered by an unassuming synth in Institute white -  _ priceless _ . X4-72 didn’t even need the help of her Gen 1 companions. She picked over their armor, weapons, and personal possessions, putting the more valuable ones into the duffle bag. Then she changed into the cleanest clothing she could salvage from the three, buckling the raider armor over top. Unfortunately, someone had gotten blood over most of the clothing. X4-72 couldn’t imagine who’d done that.

Then X4-72 headed to Diamond City. She’d been there before on surface ops. X4-72 hid the Gen 1s in a building just outside the city. She knew exactly what to say to terrorize the guards into letting her in; that she was here to see McDonough, and they wouldn’t want to upset him, now would they? X4-72 evaded the human secretary and changed into the Courser coat. Then she barged into M7-62’s office and blustered, “M7-62, report.”

M7-62 looked startled and flushed to see a Courser, and he stammered, “There’s, uhm, been a big, no, a massive explosion just now.” That would be the Institute. X4-72 couldn’t find it in herself to be sad.

“Yes,” said X4-72, with a sinister smile, “I am aware. Now, I require supplies for a surface op. You will give them to me.”

X4-72 left McDonough’s office with a fat sack of jingling caps tucked away into her duffle bag. She changed back into the raider outfit, and she went to pay a call to Dr. Sun at the Mega surgery center. She called out, “Doctor! I require a second opinion on my right eye.”

As it turned out, she just needed glasses. Glasses! X4-72 was otherwise the picture of perfect health. She was furious. Coursers wore sunglasses in the field all the time, and no one thought to make her a pair of prescription sunglasses? Good riddance to the Institute.

X4-72 handed over the caps to have Sun make her a set of both prescription sunglasses and normal glasses, and while he worked, she went up to the Colonial Taphouse, where the bartender, Henry Cooke, was an Institute informant. She stated bluntly, “You’re going to have a chat with me,” and she unzipped the duffle bag just enough to give Cooke a glimpse of the Courser coat folded neatly in the bag.

Cooke’s eyes widened, but he kept the quaver out of his voice, and he said, “Yeah, we can discuss that in the back. Wellingham, hold down the fort.”

They went to the back room, which was quiet and private, and Cooke inquired, “Well, well, well, what can I do for you? You know, I’ve been hearing there was this big kaboom at the ruins of C.I.T….”

X4-72 crossed her arms and stared down her nose at Cooke. “You hear well, human. No matter. The Institute will regroup. I will be the first of many knocking on your door. You will continue the usual arrangement.”

“Or?” asked Cooke, trying to squeeze her for caps, the gall of it.

“Or you will die. Now, do you have any other information of substance?” X4-72 demanded.

“No, ma’am,” said Cooke, with just the tiniest hint of sarcasm.

“Your ‘Wellingham’ will make me a meal,” said X4-72.

“Why, because he can’t spit in your soup?” said Cooke, rather sourly.

“Perhaps,” replied X4-72, glowering.

She had her soup in peace. Surface food was strange. It had flavour. It had texture. X4-72 didn’t know what to make of it, but she was thankful about her inherent disease resistance. Then X4-72 collected her glasses from Sun, sliding on the prescription sunglasses. The world sharpened into focus. She could see again!

X4-72 collected her Gen 1s and she headed off into the wasteland. What did she want to do with herself? She served the Institute no longer. It had rejected her service, and so she had in turn rejected it. X4-72 didn’t care about the bleeding heart Railroad or the Minutemen. If they didn’t get in her way, she’d leave them alone, but if they tried to stop her at whatever she decided to do, that was what the laser pistol in her duffle bag was for.

The Gunners had been employed by the Institute at times. X4-72 didn’t want to work for petty mercenaries, not when she’d seen the faces of the men who pulled the strings. She deserved better. Talon Company down south weren’t any better. The Brotherhood of Steel was out of the question; those bigots wouldn’t appreciate what she was.

X4-72 wandered aimlessly for weeks before ending up at the outskirts of the old Nuka-World amusement park. She found signs that the Gunners were investigating the park, which meant a possible profit for herself and her Gen 1s. At the subway terminal, she interrogated an injured man, Harvey, into revealing that raiders were using the park to lure in and enslave locals. If she took the train there, she’d be walking into a deathtrap. Harvey appeared to be genuinely frightened for his life that he’d be killed for telling her that much. X4-72 didn’t care. Harvey could die or not.

She looked over the orders she’d confiscated from the Gunner Commander Kaylor again. The Gunners were losing recon squads to Nuka-World. There had to be something valuable there. Did X4-72 want to go investigate?

The choice was hers. No human was giving her orders. X4-72 took the train. The pitiable ‘Gauntlet’ that the Raiders had organized separated her from her Gen 1s, but no matter. None of its traps or tricks posed any challenge for an engineered killing machine.

The Overboss Colter, with his custom electrically-powered armor, thought he was some hot shit. Some conniving underling of Colter’s had indicated that X4-72 might be able to defeat him by shorting out the armor with water from a silly little Thirst Zapper. X4-72 took a more direct approach, vaulting off a wrecked bumper buggy and grabbing into a ceiling spar. She swung over to where the power cord connected to the ceiling, and she ripped.

Colter’s marionette springs cut, X4-72 strangled him with the now-dead electrical cord.

* * *

Redeye had commented to Gage, “There’s no way that’s a Courser. The Institute got blown up.”

“Words from other gangs is that some got out,” said Gage, reserved. “She’s got the coat, the laser pistol, and the Gen 1s.” He had no love for the Institute; they were some shady fuckers. He just questioned the wisdom of trying to dump a Courser into the Gauntlet. He didn’t expect the results to be particularly entertaining, at least not for them. Gage was already making his escape plan.

“She’s wearing glasses!” Redeye guffawed, like that was funny.

Gage adjusted his eyepatch. He didn’t see the humour.

Shortly thereafter, neither did Redeye, when the woman - she proclaimed her name was X4-72, so yes, she was a goddamned Courser - took her first action as Overboss of Nuka-World to hunt down Redeye for sport for what he’d said about her over the intercom.

* * *

_[The fluffier part starts here below; or jump back to the beginning.] _

Electing to support X4-72 as Overboss of Nuka-World had been a dicey thing for Gage. It had come down to the simple fact that he’d realize he couldn’t outrun her if she put her mind to it. It wasn’t that she was superhuman, per se, as he observed her over the weeks where she solidified her rule of Nuka-World, wrenching bloody order out of the chaos. It was that she had a tracker’s patience, the strength of a farmer who couldn’t afford brahmin to pull a plow, a sharpshooter’s hands, and a pole-dancer’s flexibility. None of that was superhuman, by itself, but he’d never met someone who was at the top of every game, all the time, and who barely slept at all. When X4-72 did sleep, those three blasted Gen1s - the raiders had taken to calling them Larry. Curly, and Moe, but only when they were sure X4-72 couldn’t hear - watched over her.

Standing behind X4-72 was better than standing against her. That was all it was. Fuck the Institute for making creepy shit like her. God, he hated synths. They weren't robots, they weren't people... the worst of both worlds, wrapped up in one. Gage didn’t have the cultural background, but if he did,  _ La Belle Dame sans Merci _ would have come to mind.

But she’d more or less done with the Nuka-World raiders what Gage wanted  _ someone _ to do, and after Colton, beggars couldn’t be choosers. X4-72 seemed to have a fine tactical head on her shoulders, too. They’d already taken some nearby settlements. She had a plan to take the rest of the Commonwealth before the end of the year, and she’d been discussing what to do about the Brotherhood Question, which was to say - what to do when the Capital Wasteland decided to regroup after their loss in the Commonwealth.

The issue was just that the woman - fuck, she was a woman, wasn’t sure? A freaky synthetic woman - had no chill. X4-72 woke before the dawn and was up after the stars rose. She’d be working for days on end, and she expected everyone else to do the same, mocking them for their ‘human frailty’ when they complained. She drank no hooch. She did no chems. She didn’t touch the hookers. X4-72’s only pleasures seemed to be killing and, very occasionally, painting with blood and bile and marrow.

Gage was a man used to heads on pikes as decor, and he found her disturbing, and he knew he wasn’t the only one. She was bad for morale, and if he couldn’t get rid of her - and he didn’t think he could - he had to do something about her… prickliness. Gage had to find some glimpse of common humanity in that engineered murder-machine.

It was a long shot, but Gage, as her advisor, tentatively suggested to her that she ought to try the Nuka-World rides. What did he have to lose? (Aside from his life, in a brutally efficient fashion.) “Just, uh… it’s your kingdom, after all, ma’am. Might as well know what works and what doesn’t.”

Ugh, that sounded stupid.

“Hmm. You’ve probably trapped one of the rides as an assassination attempt,” she said coldly, “You will come with me. We’ll be in this together.”

Gage didn’t exactly want to spend a day riding rides for kiddies with a nightmare, but he didn’t exactly have a choice. The first ride that they tried was the Ferris wheel.

X4-72’s only comment was, “The view from the top is an acceptable platform for sniping.”

She, for some damn reason, coaxed her Gen 1s into the tea cup ride, which sedately swirled around and around. They looked ridiculous, but Gage didn’t dare to laugh.

Then there was the kiddie car ride. X4-72 frowned. “An actual functional motorcycle would be better.”

The Rocket Ride appeared to be vaguely dangerous. Gage actually fell out of his rocket seat after a few turns.

Then there were the railcars. After the railcar ride, X4-72 paused at the controls for it, drumming her fingers thoughtfully. “We need to take Saugus Ironworks.”

“From the Forged!?” said Gage, in a tone that suggested,  _ Are you crazy? _ But of course, she was.

“Yes,” X4-72 said calmly. “We’ll need the refineries. Laying rail across the Commonwealth again will allow for rapid transport of personnel and goods.”

_ That _ was what she got out of the railcar ride?

Later, at the Rocket  _ Car _ ride, which was different than the Rocket Ride, X4-72 observed, “Isn’t this just the same thing as the Kiddie Car ride?”

“Boss, I didn’t say the ancients were creative,” said Gage, shrugging. The second Rocket Ride that they found only underlined his point.

The Handy Whirl was already on and extremely fast. X4-72 watched it for a moment, head tilted to the side. Then, in one smooth motion, she grabbed Gage, chucked the whole raider over her shoulder, and jumped into the Handy Whirl.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Gage blurted as the machine spun them around like eggs in a beater. He hadn't meant to say that, oh, he hadn’t meant to say that, and how could they get off!?

“You wanted to ride the rides,” X4-72 reminded, smiling sadistically.

No, Gage wanted  _ her _ to ride the rides! He wanted her to relax! He wanted her to act like anything other than a tactically-calculating death-dealer! Why couldn’t she be a relatable, likeable leader? He blurted, “Why can’t you just have a human reaction to anything!?”

“Because I’m not human,” X4-72 replied, as if this was obvious.

The words sort of just spilled out: “Shit, I get that, I just mean - these rides are supposed to make people happy, and okay, they’re pretty hokey, but your reactions are all just… weird. The victories? The victories that you bring in are great. The repairs to the park? Having power again is awesome. I look forward to not freezing my ass off in the winter. Figuring out how to make shit like Quantum grenades and whatever? Yeah, right on, I just… you act like a robot, and creep everyone out, even the Disciples!  _ All _ the gangs would be a hell of a lot more effective if they didn’t just fear you but respected you, too.”

X4-72 narrowed her eyes behind her glasses. “You see a systems inefficiency. My demeanour is off-putting to humans.”

“Yes! A systems inefficiency! However you want to put it!” Gage felt a rush of relief.

“Entirely eliminating the human element from the organizational structure would be unfeasible,” X4-72 mused. 

“Wow, I’m glad to hear that,” Gage said sourly.

“So what behavioural modifications would I need to make to optimize their performance?’ inquired X4-72.

“It’s… going to be a lot,” Gage warned. “It’ll take time. Shit, I… let’s just see if we can find a ride that you  _ enjoy  _ and go from there?”

The Space Walk was so much space and so much walk. Wow.

The Galaxy Ride, however, was a winner. It went from uncomfortably fast (for Gage, at least) to dead stops, from darkness to blinding laser lights. Alien spaceships would come out of nowhere to ‘attack’ with fake lasers. Gage went for his rifle in a panic, but X4-72 had figured out the lasers were fake before he did and put her hand over his, grinning wildly. 

After he stumbled off the ride, feeling something of a migraine brewing, he asked, “You… actually had fun?”

“Did it look like I did?” asked X4-72.

“Well… yeah?” said Gage, rubbing his head. She’d had kind of the look that she’d get in the middle of one of her blood ‘paintings’, only somewhat less threatening.

“Then does it matter if I actually had ‘fun’? I just need to be able to  _ look _ personable,” said X4-72.

Gage gritted his teeth. That was all technically true, but he didn’t know how great an idea it was to be a party to a machine getting better at passing herself off as being human with no understanding of the actual feelings behind being human. Mulishly, he argued, “I’d like it if you actually had fun.”

“I did,” said X4-72, shrugging. “The start-stop portions were an interesting sensation, and the way that ride provoked a threat response without actually being dangerous was… pleasant. Especially that I was able to determine that it was a non-threat before you.”

What an arrogant cuss! But Gage would take it. 

X4-72 smiled at him. “Let’s ride it again.”


	24. Searching for the perfect Valentine’s Day gift - Discworld - Nick Valentine/Sam Vimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick Valentine/Sam Vimes. In which Sam must find Nick some Valentine's Day gifts or die trying, and Sybil misunderstands everything. Belongs somewhere in the ["Valentine & Vimes" Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076).

Vimes awoke on his own. He didn’t need the Pip-Boy’s alarm. He had his routine. Willikins (or possibly Codsworth) had laid out his clothes for the day. Vimes dismissed the alerts on his Pip-Boy and went and shaved. Then he went downstairs for breakfast.

Sybil had brought out the fine porcelain, instead of the day to day earthenware. There was a bouquet of hot pink roses on Vimes’s plate, next two tidily wrapped little gifts, wrapped in bright red paper. There was, on the table, a pink heart-shaped cake with a real crossbow bolt through it, which both Shaun and young Sam were eying hungrily. Vimes stared blankly. He had clearly missed something.

Vimes rechecked those Pip-Boy alerts he’d dismissed, but as he did, Sybil prompted, “Dear, it’s our Nick’s birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday. I don’t have a birthday. It’s my saint’s day, Saint Valentine’s Day,” Valentine corrected, sighing.

“Now Nick, only gods can have saints,” said Sybil.

“No, I mean that I’m named after Saint Valentine, I’ve told you that,” Valentine reminded.

Vimes’s mouth made an ‘o’, as he recalled back. “Sybil, dear, Saint Valentine was a saint because he married quite a lot of men - ”

Sybil’s expression turned quizzical.

“I’m explaining this poorly,” Vimes added hastily, “Look, it’s a holiday for, for… sweethearts.” He reached for one of the wrapped packages and slit the paper open with his nail, unfolding the paper as if he was planning on keeping it for later. The package contained chocolates. Vimes felt his ears turn pink. He knew what Valentine’s Day was. Valentine had given him a bouquet of hubflowers in the Commonwealth the last Valentine’s Day they’d celebrated together, and then they’d missed a Valentine’s Day on account of Vimes having his head up his arse. Vimes really didn’t have any excuse. There’d even been an alert set on his Pip-Boy, looking at it now. He plastered a desperate smile on his face and said, “Oh, chocolates. Lovely. I’ll have something for both of you, er, later.”

“We still get cake, right?” asked young Sam, looking at his mother, as if he expected to have the best chances there, today.

“Yes, of course, I don’t see why can’t celebrate our Nick today, even if he’s being stubborn,” said Sybil, passing the cake knife to Valentine and gently elbowing him.

Valentine leaned forward in his seat, watching Vimes intently, a slight smirk on his lips. Then he accepted the knife and cut each of the boys a slice of cake. It appeared to be strawberry cake.

Vimes’s hands shook a bit as he unwrapped the other package. It was a bag of coffee, the Klatchian stuff that Angua used to buy Vimes in times of extremis. Vimes closed his eyes. Valentine, in the Commonwealth, had said that he wanted to get Vimes chocolate, or least coffee, and apparently the detective had done… his detective work. The third package turned out to be Vimes’s brand of cigars. He said weakly, “Well. This was very thoughtful of you, Nick. I expect.”

“Sybil, I got you a lil’ something, too,” said Valentine, reaching under the table and pulling out a mixed bouquet of gladiolus, iris, and chrysanthemum and a small wrapped paper package. 

Sybil probably understood the language of flowers. Vimes hadn’t taken that one in school. Whatever the intended message was, Sybil was clearly delighted. She carefully opened her little parcel and found a box of chocolates similar to Vimes’s own. Sybil leaned over to Valentine and gave him an elegant half-hug from where she was sitting. “Oh, Nick! You shouldn’t have!” Then she made deliberate eye contact with Vimes as she assured Valentine, “We’ll have your gifts with dinner, Nick.”

* * *

Where did Valentine get off on being so… so… smooth? Valentine was charming, and Vimes loved him so very much, but what gave that man the right to remember when holidays were and have thoughtful presents ready on the go? Vimes had tucked one of the hot pink roses into his armour strapping, daring anyone to comment on it at the Watch House.

Nobby did. He said, “Looks sharp, Commander.”

Vimes sighed.

He tried to brainstorm what to get Valentine and Sybil. Both were difficult to buy for. Valentine didn’t like accepting gifts; his pride got in the way. Sybil already had almost everything she wanted. Vimes muttered to himself, “What do women even want?”

“A gin and tonic is nice,” Angua said distantly.

Vimes looked up sharply. He hadn’t even realized that the Captain was standing there; he’d been so lost in thought. “Er. Captain Angua.”

She launched into her daily report.

* * *

In that thin period after work but before Vimes had to be home for the boys, he frantically attempted to find gifts. Valentine had a very particular style, which he wore effortlessly. Vimes tried to track down where Valentine usually bought his clothes, although Valentine didn’t buy clothes often. Did Valentine even really need anything new, Vimes wondered despondently? The man mended his own clothing whenever he had any damages, even though they could certainly afford an,  _ ahem _ , tailor.

That, and Deacon kept claiming he was a tailor, or at least that he knew how to thread the needle.

Stopping at the store where he was fairly certain Valentine bought his clothing was a mistake. Lewton was there, clearly malingering and ogling the fedoras. Lewton said icily, “Vimes.”

“You haven’t asked for a warrant lately,” Vimes observed. “Haven’t been up to work that’s needed one, hmm?”

“Hah!” Lewton barked. “You’d like that, wouldn't you, getting me to slip up? Well, my business is private business, and it’s none of your business.”

Vimes did wonder about that, but he settled on just buying Valentine a tie. The problem with buying Valentine a tie was that, as Vimes was learning, a tie was what all upper class young boys who didn’t know what their fathers wanted would buy them. 

He considered stopping at Wizla’s to get Valentine some cigarettes, but then he hesitated. Sybil didn’t want Valentine smoking in the house, and Valentine didn’t, but perhaps it was better not to encourage him? Vimes  _ did not _ consider buying Valentine any of the alcohols that his beloved favoured, because oh, Vimes ached for a bearhugger’s whisky deep in his bones, and he knew he’d never stop at one, so if he bought Valentine a bottle… well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Valentine liked books. He wasn’t particularly picky about them, either, as far as Vimes could tell. Vimes bought Valentine one of the new Tenpenny Dreadfuls from a street vendor, feeling faintly guilty. He didn’t even know if Valentine had read this one.

Then he stopped at Wienrich and Boettcher’s, a snooty chocolate shop, the sort where they didn’t list the prices in the window to discourage the poor. Vimes seethed faintly to even be there, but it was the sort of place why Sybil would buy chocolate from, right? Or rather, where one of Sybil’s servants would buy chocolates from?

Wienrich or Boettcher or possibly just a clerk gave the Watchman, who often eschewed wearing any of the insignias of his rank on a day to day basis and who could make a breastplate look rumpled, a disdainful look. Something unpleasantly liked a smile tugged at one of the corners of Vimes’s mouth, and he asked, “So, what’s Euphemia King’s favourite assortment?”

“We do not disclose private information about customers to…” Wienrich or Boettcher or possibly just a clerk said dismissively.

“Right, I’ll have whatever box is one better for my lady Sybil,” Vimes said cheerily.

This was Ankh-Morpork, where the Duke could and often was any ratty Watchman off the street. Horror spread across Wienrich or Boettcher or possibly just a clerk’s face.

* * *

Vimes made a few other stops before returning in time to listen to young Sam and Shaun talk about their schoolwork and then for dinner.

Sybil had, apparently, arranged a surprise party for Nick.

Deacon and Hancock were both complaining over not being allowed to jump out of the cake and were glaring at each other.

Young Sam and Shaun were delighted to have Nat and Mango over.

Valentine grabbed Vimes and then, very deliberately, walked both of them into one of the pit-traps in the mansion. In the darkness of the pit-trap, Valentine shook Vimes and groused, “Sam, it’s not my birthday! You’ve got to talk to Sybil! This isn’t how you celebrate Valentine’s Day!”

“Right, uhm, I’ll have a word,” Vimes mumbled, climbing out of the pit trap to go look for Sybil and feeling rather glum. Eventually, he found her, amidst their accumulated friend groups, which was a very strange thing indeed to have, and he said quickly but quietly, “Er, Sybil, darling, I’m sure you meant well, but this is really not…” he seized upon the next word like a drowning man to a life preserver, “ _ culturally _ appropriate for our Nick. I think he’s a bit overwhelmed.”

Sybil deflated a little, and Vimes’s heart about snapped. He added hastily, “Again, it’s not his birthday, it’s Valentine’s Day, for sweethearts, and well, I got you some flowers,” snapdragons, “and a box of Wienrich and Boettcher chocolates,” a box that was better than the ones Euphemia King favoured, please and thank you, “a book,” the same one that he’d grabbed for Valentine; sometimes Sybil and Valentine liked to discuss books together, “and a new imp-powered eggbeater.” He knew bloody well that they didn’t need a new eggbeater; the old Ramkin hand-crank egg beater from two centuries ago still worked fine, but Sybil had a strange fascination with gadgets.

Sybil lit up with delight and swept Vimes into a crushing but welcome embrace. His ribs creaked a little when she released him. She effused, “Oh, Sam, it’s wonderful! ...but where’s Nick gotten off to? You need to give him his presents, too.” Her tone of voice suggested that she expected Vimes to absolutely also have gifts for Valentine and that, if he did not, Vimes would find himself with gifts for Valentine whether he liked it or not.

Vimes looked back down the hallway and peered at the pit trap, where he found Valentine slinking his way out in an attempt to avoid the party. He ambushed Valentine, thrusting one slim envelope upon him before Valentine could refuse. He said, annoyed and unenthused, “Oh. A card.”

Then he opened the envelope. It was not a card. It was, in fact, a seemingly nonsense string of letters. Valentine squinted at it, tilting his head to the side. “...a cipher?’

After a few seconds, he took off, out to the garden, where Codsworth had been digging up a plant bed. Valentine dug in the freshly turned loam for a moment and found the boxed tie, which, in addition to the tie, contained some cut newspaper clippings with various words underlined. He narrowed his optics as he regarded Vimes, and he asked, “So did you hide all my gifts behind stupid puzzles?”

“Ye-es?” admitted Vimes, hands behind his back.

Valentine lit up. “Thanks, doll, I love it!” He gave Vimes a hug over the shoulder and a peck on the cheek. Then he took off again, apparently having already solved the newspaper clipping puzzle.

He went to the kitchen and found, on the counter, his bouquet of flowers - just roses, Vimes really didn’t know what to get Valentine. For Sybil, snapdragons made sense, but there was no robot-themed flowers to be had at the corner grocery. Valentine tucked one into his lapel and then picked through the bouquet with interest, quickly realizing that one rose had a scrap of paper hidden in it. He mumbled to himself, “What’s this written in, street Dwarfish?”

Then he proceeded to puzzle through it himself. Valentine had been working so hard at picking up street Dwarfish. His patrol partners only giggled at one word out ten these days when valentine tried to speak it.

Valentine hunted down the next gift, which was his book, and he found written out on the back inner jacket - “Mirror writing, uh huh,” which he promptly held up to a mirror and used to track down the last gift.

It was a box of the cheapest chocolates that Wienrich and Boettcher had available. That clerk hadn’t even wanted to admit it existed. Valentine picked one out and held it up, examining it. “Uh… Sam, I don’t eat?”

Vimes grinned and took Valentine’s wrist and closed his mouth over Valentine’s fingers, taking the chocolate from him, lips lingering a moment on Valentine’s fingertips. “No. You don’t. But I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deacon, Hancock, Shaun, and Piper all know what Valentine's Day is but went along with Sybil's assertion that it is Nick's birthday because they found it funny. Shaun also just wanted cake and an excuse for a party. Piper told Sally, which means that Sally's going to tell the rest of the Watch, and Nick will never live this down, poor man.


	25. Scavenger hunt - Fo4 - Nick Valentine & Harkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nick has a case and Harkness agrees to help Nick with said case if it will temporarily stop Nick from snooping around Railroad business.
> 
> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)  
> [Snow day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72408081)  
> [Reading in a pillow fort](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72480117)  
> [Breakfast in bed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72568134)  
> [Slow dancing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72819870)  
> 

Nick Valentine hadn’t heard from his friend, Nate Charles, in quite a while. He knew that the man had been going through some… things. The whole Commonwealth had. For one thing, the whole damn Institute had gone kablooie. Sources suggested that Nate Charles and his, ahem, friends had been involved in that incident. Well, whatever had happened, Ellie slept a whole lot more easily, knowing the body-snatchers were gone, and Piper had been forced to actually cover new news in her newspaper, instead of her recycled anti-Institute drivel. There was a cautious sort of hope to the Commonwealth, free of the Institute’s stifling grasp.

Plus, the Minutemen were coming back, too. Nick had always liked them. 

He decided to go check on Nate, although it was only partially out of the goodness of his reactor core. Nick had a case, just a small one, to retrieve a family heirloom, and the lead culprit were Raiders. Ellie had scolded him, “Nick Valentine, if you get yourself kidnapped again - ”

So he wanted a little muscle along as backup. This wasn’t entirely a social visit. Nick had heard that Nate was living up in Sanctuary these days. It wasn’t a bad walk, and these days, the roads were safer than they’d than they’d been in years. He found Sanctuary to be a bustling, growing little settlement, and he was greeted politely by a Minuteman who seemed to recognize Nick by reputation alone. “Wow, the great synth detective, huh?”

“I dunno about great,” said Nick, shrugging. “Could you direct me to Mr. Charles’s digs these days?”

“Of course, Mr. Valentine,” said the Minuteman, respectfully.

Nate lived in a mended and rebuilt ‘House of the Future’. The original Nick Valentine had been planning on getting one of those for him and Jenny, one day, moving out of that cramped apartment downtown in the city… but alas, it was not to be. Nate was apparently next-door neighbours with some ‘Rosa’ family. Nick knocked on the door.

He was answered by a tall, brown-haired man that he recognized as one Richard Harkness. Harkness had once been the chief of Rivet City security, and he’d outlived the slaughter of his town. A sad story, really. These days, Harkness was keeping some… interesting friends. Nick phrased it a little more bluntly in the safety of his own metal skull: Harkness was a Railroad agent, just like Nick knew damn well that Nate was a Railroad agent, too. Nick had occasionally glimpsed Nate working with Harkness or with a third Railroad agent who favoured sunglasses. The Institute was gone, yes, but rogue Institute scientists remained a threat. Nick imagined that the Railroad had no shortage of work. He greeted, “Well, hello there. I was looking for Nate, actually. Don’t suppose he’s in?”

Harkness’s eyes briefly darted towards the kitchen, and he said smoothly, “Now’s not a good time. Nate’s crying in the kitchen because he just burnt a whole box of mac’n’cheese, and we have four children to feed.”

Nick Valentine had a sense of smell. Why the Institute had seen fit to give him a sense of smell, he sometimes questioned, but he had one. Someone had burnt mac’n’cheese, and he could hear someone crying, but he didn’t think it was Nate. The voice was higher-pitched than he’d expect of the man. Trying to look that way, to glimpse into the kitchen, it looked like these just might be a woman there with Nate, a woman who was pretty upset over her culinary misadventures.

Now, what kind of adult needed to be taught how to cook something as simple as mac’n’cheese? What wastelander didn’t learn that as a child?

An escaped Institute synth trying to learn how to make it in the world, Nick reckoned. He said obliquely to Harkness, “You’ve been spending too much time with your friend with the sunglasses.” _You’re lying, but I have enough grace not to say as much._

Harkness looked rueful. “Not enough, apparently.”

“Four kids, huh? Nate find his boy?” Nick had been wondering how that case would turn out.

Harkness grimaced. “...yeah. And then some. Not my story to tell. Now, what did you need, Mr. Valentine?”

That was a clear sore point, and Harkness was being evasive. Nick said, “I’d say I was just checking in on him to see how he was doing, but truthfully, I could use a little backup on a case. Missing heirloom, snatched by raiders.”

Harkness could see that Nick was looking around and that Nick was seeing more than Harkness wanted him to. The ‘Now’s not a good time’ had not worked. There was a brief moment where Harkness seemed to be trying to calculate a) if he could just throw Nick out and b) if he could get away with it, but no, this was a _nice_ neighbourhood now, with folks about who’d object to that sort of thing. So Harkness offered, “Why don’t I just help you with that myself while Nate’s busy? Hell, I’ve dealt with my share of stolen goods cases, back in the day.”

Harkness really did not want Nick looking around in the house, which made Nick want to look around in the house all the more, but he wasn’t too proud to turn down free help. He said firmly, “Sure. I’ll catch up with Nate later, then.”

“Sure,” Harkness said sourly. “Give me a minute to get my rifle and armour.” He closed the door.

Nick took a moment to try to creep around the house. They had, he noted, hung up mis-matched curtains. They looked nice. They also blocked the view into all the windows. He could hear other people in the house, though, including some lighter feet that could be children. It’d be swell if Nate really had found his son and maybe adopted a few more kids with… well, just what was with Nate and Harkness and Sunglasses, anyway? Rumor on the street in Goodneighbour was that those three were a _menage a trois_.

When Nick heard the front door re-opening, he bolted back to where he’d been standing. Harkness, now in a guard’s black armour, rifle slung over his back, eyed Nick suspiciously. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah. Client’s a new immigrant to Diamond City. Said raiders snatched the item while she an’ her family were making their way to Diamond City,” Nick explained, walking as he talked.

“Describe the item?” prompted Harkness, who followed Nick.

“Oh, about a foot long, soft, stuffed with fibre-fill, cloth covering mended but otherwise in good shape, brown, bear-shaped - ” Nick started.

“You’re looking for a teddy bear,” Harkness said sharply.

“So I’m looking for a teddy bear,” Nick admitted.

“You’re willing to go out and get pot-shot by raiders over a teddy bear?” Harkness asked, incredulous.

“Hey, you try saying ‘no’ to a little lady of age six when there’s tears welling up in her eyes at you from across the desk!” Nick snapped.

“I’ve heard things about you, Nick Valentine, but how do you stay in business?” asked Harkness.

“That’s what Ellie asks me, too,” said Nick, ruefully.

Harkness muttered, “Better me doing this than Nate, anyway. The man’s a sap when children are involved. Now, do you know where these raiders are?”

“Lil’ Lacey Adams said they went up North. They were trying to grab her - probably slavers,” Nick scowled darkly, “but all they got was the bear. I tracked them a bit. I’ll take you to where I left off,” said Nick.

Harkness was _really_ good at tracking. Nick didn’t even have to point out anything to him; he just immediately saw the tracks and took after them. Was that Railroad training in action, or had Harkness been a cut above the average security guard? Ain’t no one in Diamond City Security who could find his own tush.

They ended up walking at a brisk pace for hours. Nick tried to make small talk, asking, “So how’d you and Nate meet?” _Was it through Sunglasses?_

“Sort of a long story,” Harkness muttered, examining a strip of badly-cured leather caught on a thorn bush.

“We got the time, and I got audio sensors,” said Nick.

Harkness chewed on his lip. “Ah, hell… you know Nate’s a pre-War Vaultie, right?”

“Uh-huh. If he hadn’t told me myself, Piper put it in the paper. Think all of Diamond City knows by now,” said Nick.

“Yeah. Well. Me too. Vault 112, down in the Capital Wasteland,” said Harkness.

Nick raised an eloquent brow, prompting Harkness to go on.

“It was a virtual reality simulation Vault. Army tech. Held our bodies in a sort of suspended animation. I got out. Wish more did, too,” Harkness grimaced. “Anyway, me and Natie were buds in the Army. Met when we were both just 18, in basic. Served in the Yukon together, then up in Anchorage.”

“You’re pre-War,” Nick said slowly.

“Yeah. Career Army, but then, I didn’t have a kid at home like Nate. I… never managed that for Rachael.” Harkness frowned slightly.

“Shoot, you’re saying I can talk to you about the Sox, an’ you actually understand the rules of baseball?” Nick prompted.

“Yeah? I was a Nationals fan myself, but sure,” said Harkness.

Nick patted the other man on the shoulder. He complained, “Half the folks I meet these days think baseball was a gladiatorial bloodsport! Oh… and movies! Did you catch that flick with Keith McKinney, I think it was _Dutch Diggers of Dusseldorf_?”

“Keith McKinney, that dreamboat?” Harkness sighed. “Yeah, I did. Kinda regret it. The missus made me pay for it, after.”

Nick filed away that comment, but he was too caught in nostalgia to let the momentum go, “Oh, and Slocum's Joe! The doughnuts, the coffee - ”

“Ugh, why’d you have to go and bring those up? Chicory’s no substitute for coffee, and razorgrain doughnuts sure do lack something. Fluffiness. Flavour - ”

“120% of your daily recommended value of sugar?” Nick suggested, grinning.

“That too,” said Harkness, looking wistful.

“So what happened to your missus?” asked Valentine.

Harkness sighed heavily. “She left me while I was stuck in Vault 112. Died somewhere.”

Nick gave Harkness another pat on the shoulder. “That’s rough.”

“Yeah. It was. Worse for Rachael than me, in the end,” admitted Harkness. “I was damn lucky to meet Nate again, after all… that. So… just how do you have pre-War memories, anyway?”

“The Institute found a pre-War brainscan of a cop named Nick Valentine and uploaded it onto a Gen 2,” explained Nick. “Damned if I know why. Experimented on me a while. Then dumped me into this brave new world when they had no more use for me.”

“Bit weird that they didn’t just dismantle you,” Harkness observed, “Not that I'm complaining. I’m just saying.”

“Yeah. I dunno. Guess I can’t ask them why now.” He looked back to where the explosion had gone up.

Harkness was, Nick was observing, a completely relentless tracker. He didn’t pause or take breaks like any human Nick had ever worked with. Marty had taken… a lot of breaks, but Nate took breaks like a normal person, and Harkness just… didn’t. Harkness didn’t show any signs of fatigue after hours of walking. He didn’t complain about the light when sunset came. Nick had to think about all that, too.

Eventually, they found the raiders, and Harkness said, “This is your case. I’m just your backup. How did you want to run this?”

“Wouldn’t mind doing this quietly, if that’s what you’re asking.” Nick detested raiders, but he hardly wanted to slaughter a whole camp, and anyway, they were only two men. “I’d say talk it over, but I doubt they’re up for talking.”

Harkness hesitated. Then he admitted, “I’ve got a spare Stealth Boy.”

Stealth Boys were certainly worth more than a teddy bear, sentimental value aside, and Nick was surprised that Harkness would offer that up. Maybe the hard-nosed man did have a heart. “That’d be swell.”

Harkness popped the Stealth Boy, which looked a bit weird. Were off-brand Stealth Boys a thing? Then he crept into the camp.

Not long after, Harkness returned with the teddy bear. Nick grinned, “I’ll tell lil’ Miss Lacey Adams she can thank you.”

Harkness shrugged. “Don’t think anything of it.”

Nick was going to think a whole lot of things about Harkness, though. His story didn’t add up. “I’ll get this back to Diamond City and its owner. I still want to catch up sometime with Nate, you hear?”

“Of course,” said Harkness, unreadable.

“And you, too. Can’t have too many friends in this world,” said Nick, heading into the darkness, teddy bear in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harkness, the Fallout 3 synth with the memories of a pre-War combat veteran, and Nick Valentine, the Fallout 4 synth with the memories of a pre-War detective, ought to have some _interesting_ interactions, especially considering that Harkness also has a past as both a tracker _and_ a security guard who occasionally did some detective work. However, it would take Harkness a very long time getting to know Nick before he'd be comfortable admitting his issues to Nick.


	26. Insomnia / falling asleep in each other’s arms / bedsharing - Fo1 - Vault Dweller/Tycho

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vault Dweller/Tycho. Canon divergent. Assumes that,  
> instead of hanging around Vault 13 and founding a tribe, the Vault  
> Dweller stayed with the Brotherhood and [was sent to the east to go tracking escapees from the Master's army](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel_\(Midwest\)#Background).  
> Same universe as:  
>  _[Adopting an animal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480460)  
> [Date night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71960271)  
> [Star gazing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72084183)  
> [Huddling for warmth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481372)  
> [First “I Love You” ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72807456)  
> [Hiding from a storm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71899419)  
> [Fishing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758)  
> _

Asking Albert into his tent had posed certain challenges. Tycho’s tent had really been built for one. Albert had a medium build, and him and Tycho could barely fit in together. Having another person there for warmth had its advantages, but Albert trying to fall asleep on top of Tycho didn’t work. Tycho ended up feeling claustrophobic over being in a poor position to bolt up and chase down an enemy, what with having someone right on top of him.

Tycho on top of Albert didn’t work, either, because if Tycho was face down on Albert, he got antsy about someone putting a knife in his back, and if Tycho was face up on Albert, that just felt like some weird stacking. Albert made for a lumpy mattress.

So they tried laying on their sides, face to face, and that was kind of nice. Tycho thought it meant he woke up just a little too focused on Albert’s face, though. He tried playing big spoon to Albert, holding the other man in his arms, which just gave him a good view of the back of Albert’s head - the man had a counterclockwise cowlick.

That was why Tycho ended up little spoon. He had all the warmth of another person snuggled up against him, nothing was blocking him, and it wasn’t hard to get up out of Albert’s arms if he had to run in a hurry. The fact that he could expect to wake up to soft little kisses on the back of his neck was purely a tertiary consideration that in no way factored into his decision that he could put off building a bigger tent for later.


	27. Spa Day - Fo4 - Harkness/Deacon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles). AU where Deacon sweet-talked Harkness into joining the Railroad after Rivet City was destroyed by the Brotherhood for parts to build the _Prydwen_. Remember how Pinkerton installed the memories of a pre-War combat veteran into A3-21 to make Harkness? Nate knew Harkness before the war; they were in the same unit. Established relationship between Harkness/Deacon/Male Sole Survivor (Nate Charles).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as:  
> [Cooking Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71481072)  
> [Caring for them while they’re sick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72295053)  
> [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72340698)  
> [Snow day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72408081)  
> [Reading in a pillow fort](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72480117)  
> [Breakfast in bed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72568134)  
> [Slow dancing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/72819870)  
> [Scavenger hunt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/73021545)  
> 

“You need a spa day,” Deacon said, looking critically at Harkness.

The Railroad heavy had been dispatched by Carrington to go deal with an Institute Courser who had escaped the destruction of the Institute. If Deacon knew Harkness, Harkness had probably made an attempt at talking down said Courser first. The fact that Harkness was now returning splattered in blood that was mostly not his own, with new laser burns on his armour, said that said talk didn’t go well.

“Thanks, Deacon,” Harkness said sarcastically. “You could just say I look like shit.”

Eyes hollowed and dark, exhausted, the aforementioned blood-splattered and burnt attire, muscles all tensed with frustration...

“No, no!” Deacon scolded. “You just need some tender loving care.”

“I’m waking up with an undercut and a glitter star on my cheek again, aren’t I?” Harkness said wearily.

“Maybe! And if you’re really good, I’ll throw in gel nails, too,” Deacon teased, carefully and slowly, with no sudden motions, walking behind Harkness.

“Remind me why I put up with you?” Harkness grunted.

Deacon cautiously laid his hands on Harkness’s shoulders and then gave his neck a tentative rub. Men had been killed for lesser personal space violations, Deacon was sure, but Harkness actually relaxed at his touch, which Deacon took as a personal triumph. “Jazz hands.”

“Hmph. Right,” Harkness grumped, though he leaned back into the massage.

“That’s it, come to daddy,” Deacon encouraged. “Oh, and what colour did you want on those gel nails?”

“Get wasted, Deacon,” was what Harkness said, but what he did was melted under Deacon’s hands.

Deacon smirked. “I’ll take that as grey urban camo, cool.”


	28. gardening/farming - Fo4 - Desdemona/Lambda 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Desdemona/[Lambda 8](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Railroad_HQ_terminal_entries#2276_Jan). Before Desdemona was the leader of the Railroad, she was Angie the simple farmer who'd fallen in love with a strange woman who went by "Sam" (the synth Lambda 8).
> 
> Same universe as: [Halloween](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71480559)

Once upon a time, Desdemona had not been Desdemona, plucked from a Shakespearean tragedy. She’d been Angie the simple farmer. Most folks were farmers. It took a lot of farmers to support the few skilled tradesmen in the Commonwealth. 

Farmers in the Commonwealth had to be distrustful. A passer-through might steal. Worse, raiders were common. Still, when Angie found a dazed, scared woman in an oddly clean, new-looking white jumpsuit hiding in her corn, half-dead of Boston’s bitterly chill winter, Angie offered up her up some hospitality, taking the woman into her farmstead and wrapping her in blankets and pressing a warm mug of dandelion root tea into her hands.

“What’s your name, stranger?” Angie asked.

“Lamb… er, Sam? Yes. Sam,” the woman said, looking furtive.

Throwing away one name for another was common enough. Plenty of folks had pasts they wanted to hide. “Well, Sam, I’m Angie, and this is my farmstead. Where are you from?”

Angie had heard tales from traders of the Enclave down south. Maybe they’d look that clean? Angie heard tell the Enclave wanted to poison the water, but this woman didn’t look in shape to do anything.

“I…” a dawning look of horror appeared on Sam’s face. “I can’t tell you. It’s gone. The memory is gone. I was in… and then I got out. And now I’m here.”

Angie’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Don’t go telling folks that. It’s a weak story, and they’ll think you’re up to something. So, Sam, what are you up to?”

Sam’s eyes widened, her hands shaking on the cup of dandelion tea. “I’m not up to anything! I just… don’t want to go back.”

“Don’t want to go back to here you can’t remember?” Angie raised an eyebrow, her arms crossed.

“I just want to be free,” said Sam, hunching up under the blankets.

_ Oh _ , thought Angie. If Sam was telling the truth - if she was an escaped slave, well, that explained a lot. Trauma did things to the mind. “If you need work, there’s plenty around the farm, and you’ll have a warm place to stay and all the food you can eat.”

“That sounds nice,” said Sam, who fell asleep under the pile of blankets.

Sam was a quick study and easily learned the lessons in farming that Angie was teaching, how to sow, to weed, to reap razorgrain when the harvest came. More, she found an old Mr. Handy and fixed it right up, adding the machine to their farm. Not long after that, Angie asked the strange woman to marry her. Sam had been delighted, and then she had closed up, chewing her lip pensively. “Angie. I told you I don’t remember where I’m from, and that’s not quite so.”

“No?” asked Angie.

“I don’t remember getting out, but I do know where I’m from, and I remember what I am. I’m a synth, a servant android made by a place called the Institute. I’m a machine, like that Mr. Handy I fixed up for the farm,” Sam admitted, searching Angie’s face for her reaction.

Angie’s eyes widened. That sounded like a load of something she could use to fertilize the corn, but Sam looked like she was telling the truth as she knew it. “Well Sam, my love, you seem just like a person to me, so I don’t see why that should matter.”

“I was Lambda-Eight-Fifteen,” Sam added.

“You’re my Sam. You’re my girl,” said Angie, struggling to understand. Was Sam right? Was she some android? Or was this just Sam’s trauma having a funny way of showing itself?

“Then if it doesn’t matter to you, I’ll be your wife,” Sam said, tears of gratitude in her eyes that, whether or not Angie had believed her, at least Angie didn’t reject her.

They asked the preacher from Diamond City to come down, and they married in the vegetable garden, between the carrots and the tatos, and for a while, their farm was just as fruitful as could be.


End file.
